She put her arms around me and came close. After a long time she said: “It’s not so terrible now, is it?”
“I just hate it.”
“You won’t.”
“Time the great healer, I suppose?”
“Partly. Partly that after you’ve thought it over, and the romance has palled, you’ll be turning handsprings I did marry somebody else. Because you’re not ready yet, for a wife and two children that aren’t even yours. You’d have to quit school, and I’d have to keep on with this job I’ve got, and — a lot of things. But, Jack.”
“Yes?”
“Send me one red rose a year.”
“All right.”
“You love me?”
“Yes.”
I guess trains run between Baltimore and Easton, because if they had one to take me there it looks like there’d be one to take me back. But I don’t remember any train, any change at Philly, or anything of that kind. All I remember is wandering around that night, on a bridge over some river, on a street with picture shows on it, and up and down a hill near Lafayette College, trying to get through my head what was going to happen, so I could kill what I felt for her and get used to it she was going to marry somebody else. As to what it meant, from where he sat, if he ever heard of it, that she’d go around with him and then spend a week end with me, I tried not to think and I can’t even make sense of it now. I guess, when you come down to it, if it was cockeyed enough, it could be what she said, a lyric, to be sung once and then forgotten. Then next day, Monday, I was home, in my room, going through the whole thing again. I thought it was funny my aunts had so little to say, specially about running off after the football game. But they just said hello and asked me no questions, and the house was so still you could hear the kids playing outside. Then along toward dark I heard my father’s voice downstairs, and Nancy called that he wanted to see me.
He was in the study, and didn’t look at me when we shook hands. He had nothing to say about the football game, or anything, until I had sat there some little time. Then: “Jack, I’ve bad news for you.”
“Yeah? What about?”
“Your securities.”
“... Oh. I’ve been hearing about them.”
“Then you know of the crash?”
“What crash?”
“Of Black Tuesday, as they’re calling it.”
“I’ve been — playing football.”
“Yes — I should have congratulated you.”
“It’s not important.”
He began, then, telling me about the stock-market drop, twisting his face with his hand, or untwisting it, maybe. He told me about this stock and that I’d had, how some of them had been sold and replaced with others, how he’d watched the dates so I’d always have dividend checks coming in, some due one month, some another. It seemed to give him quite a lot of satisfaction I’d had some profit on some of the deals, and that for four or five years now I’d been cashing dividend checks at the rate of twenty or thirty dollars a month. “But — I’m broke, Dad, is that it?”
“I don’t know yet. I didn’t do what many did, throw everything overboard for salvage value. I thought it over, I even resorted to prayer, I’m not ashamed to confess. And I decided if I held on, at least the stock was the stock. If, as, and when, the market recovers, it’ll be there, it’ll have a value, and it’ll pay dividends, or so we hope. Except, of course—”
“Come on, let’s have it.”
“Some I carried for you on margin.”
“And—?”
“It’s gone.”
“Well, what does the totalizer say?”
“I have the list here... It says, at the prices I paid for it, there’s three thousand dollars odd of stock in the clear, and two small government bonds. What any of that is worth now I’d hate to say. It could be sold, I guess. Whether dividends will continue, that we don’t know. But, disregarding the future, considering only now — it’s gone.”
“Everything?”
“Practically.”
“Well, that’s that.”
“Jack, it tortures me, it humiliates me, it — stultifies me, that I have to tell you this, after the issue I made of it. I’d give my right hand not to, for I think you’ll believe me when I say if I could draw the money from the bank and hand over what I lost for you, I’d do it. I can’t. I haven’t told you everything. There’s more. I myself am heavily hit. I said nothing to you, but I’ve expanded. With your friend Denny’s father, I leased a lot, on Mt. Royal near the Automobile Club, and started a big garage, with general service, pit for car wash, pumps, tanks, jacks — an installation in six figures. We were unequal to it alone, naturally, and went to a bank. And since this they’re pressing us hard. And while we’ve raised something — how I simply won’t tell you — we’re still in frightful shape. The big service station is completely gone as a possibility at this time. The agency, the North Avenue place, I keep, but it’s — involved. Heavily. All I can say is, when I can, if I ever can, I shall regard your funds as a debt, and you shall—”
“Look, everybody makes mistakes.”
“—be paid. Now, as to college—”
“I have a deal. If I want it, there’ll be a job.”
“What kind of a job?”
“I don’t know. They’ve got ethics now, though, whatever they are, and I can’t just play football.”
“But you can finish?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Thank God for that.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Sam Shreve shot himself, if that helps.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“He — gave us the benefit of his best judgment, but it wasn’t good enough, let us say.”
“That often happens.”
I went back to my room, lay down again, and thought of what she had said, about checking up on my stock. That seemed about all it amounted to: one more thing to remind me of her. As to being broke, that didn’t seem to mean anything, and as for his losing my money for me, I didn’t hold it against him. But it seemed funny to me, from the brush-off I gave it, that he wouldn’t know there was something on my mind, and at least ask me what it was. Well, why couldn’t I tell him what it was? If I knew that, I wouldn’t be writing all this up.
Almost at once, from a house where things were done in a freehanded way, it turned into a house that needed money, where everybody drew deep breaths, let them out trembly, and went whole days without looking at each other. It was the same up and down the street, all you heard at the drugstore on North Avenue, or anywhere. Denny felt it, and it was the first time I found out what his father did, besides going to Europe all the time. He was an investor. He had inherited property from his father, a cement works somewhere near Catoctin Mountain, where Lee and McClellan tangled just before Antietam, and then branched out into contracting, road-building, bridge-building, and stuff like that. But he let the superintendent attend to construction, and concentrated on backing businesses, or buying into them, or foreclosing on them, as some said, and taking his profit on those that panned out. So that was how he and the Old Man came to be mixed up in the Mt. Royal Avenue thing. Mt. Royal Avenue, in Baltimore, is a continuation of Mt. Royal Terrace and the same street they’ve got in every big city, the center of the automobile trade. The Old Man was a little ahead of his day, but he saw the need for what is now called super-service, with every kind of work done on the spot and none of it sent out, and trouble-shooting on a twenty-four-hour schedule. That kind of location cost money, the equipment cost money, and the stock cost money. But Mr. Deets got hit too, because he was one hundred per cent in the market, with no sidelines for a cushion if something went wrong. One day he was rich, the next day he was a bum, or as near it as a guy like that, with forty-seven connections, ever really gets. Denny took it hard, and that I could have stood, but he also took it big. I mean, he’d drop around, and we’d take a ride, because at least I had the Buick that followed the Chevvie. Then he’d talk about what we were going to do about it. I didn’t know, and I was still mooning about what happened in Easton. And then one day, just after Thanksgiving, when we’d gone back to college, he came in the room and closed the door in his same old hush-hush way. “Jack, I’ve been in town.”