“Your feelings are inside, and I think you know about them. Your intentions are what you’re going to do about them, and frankly, Mr. Legg, it wouldn’t be fair to Margaret or you or anybody to put on an act that I wanted to do something about them when there’s nothing I can do. My father’s in a bad way. I’ve got no work, and I don’t know of any work. So far as my intentions go, suppose you tell me.”
“But if you had work?”
“Watch me.”
“Then let’s fix things up.”
“O.K., I’d like a chance to get a little money together, say three or four or five months to pay off a few things that have come up in my senior year and bulge the bank balance up a little bit, and then, say around October or November—”
“Fine, Jack. I like your attitude. Ah, before you go, I’d like you to know her mother will be — shall we say? — relieved. Not only pleased, but eased, in her mind. To be perfectly frank, with Margaret having notions of going to New York and concertizing, we’ve been concerned.”
“I don’t think you need be.”
“Why not, Jack?”
“I doubt if she’s got it.”
“... So do we.”
We were in his private office, a small paneled room with pictures of Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Francis Scott Key and some Cartarets in it, and he came over from behind the desk and leaned close to me and let me have it out of the side of the mouth in a way you wouldn’t think a member of the Maryland Club would ever talk. “... We think she’s kidding herself, and badly. Frankly, when Harold Randolph was alive and the piano seemed something for a young lady and one could be proud of her but not alarmed about her, I was all for it. But then when that vaudeville business started, and Randolph died and this new crowd came in at the Peabody — we’ve been growing uneasy, uneasy, uneasy. Jack, am I making myself clear?”
Randolph was an F.F.V. that had run the Peabody Conservatory as long as anybody could remember. But somewhere around the time I entered college he had died, and Margaret had gone with some bozo from Texas that had pumped her full of stuff about temperament, and I knew what Mr. Legg meant. I just winked and he winked back. “Jack, suppose she did have it? It’s no life for a woman. I want her married. She’s crazy about you, so take it over. And Jack, I like that idea of getting a little stake, so you’re your own man. But don’t overdo. I mean, don’t worry about money. Soon as you’re married, get a baby started, so she — you get it, boy, get it?”
He cackled and laughed and shook hands and opened the door on a crack and peeped out and then opened a panel and in there were bottles and glasses and fizz water. So we had a drink and he laughed and clapped me on the back some more. It sounds like one nice guy talking to another nice guy about what had to be settled before they could do something nice for a pretty nice girl, and I wish I could tell it that way. But what I said, which was what I meant, makes no sense unless you know what had happened, over at the college, the week before, on a Friday afternoon that Denny and I had to spend there, on account of a test we both had coming up the next morning. Denny had long since forgotten about engineering, and switched over to psychology and business practice and advertising and some more courses like that, that he could piece together for a degree, but we were in the same calculus class and they were throwing a test at us. We were both good at math, and there was no need to bone the test, so it was just an afternoon to kill. About three o’clock he came in our room carrying a big carton, with a colored fellow behind him carrying another, and he acted pretty mysterious about it. Come to find out it was beer, and where it came from I don’t know, but if you ask me his father had given an order and then asked the bootlegger to stop by, on his way into the District, with a little for Denny. But of course, in a case like that, Denny would have to talk big about his “connections.” That didn’t bother me any. It was a hot day in April and I took the bottles out, then took one of the cartons to the drug store and filled it with cracked ice and came back and put the stopper in the basin and loaded some bottles in and put ice around them and pretty soon we were set.
So of course, nothing draws like beer, so it wasn’t long before we had company. We didn’t have many, not over four or five or six, because on a Friday afternoon nobody sticks around there that doesn’t have to. But we had that many, drinking out of the bottlenecks after Denny used the opener, and getting kind of sociable, that is, all except Morton. Morton was known simply as Salt, and when it rained he poured and at all other times he poured, a thin, do-gooder line that got on everybody’s nerves and of course only got worse with beer. However, nobody got sore at all, until after Cannon began his toasting. Who Cannon started to toast I don’t know, maybe the college or Governor Ritchie or General Pershing, it doesn’t make much difference and one guess is as good as another up to and including the Queen of Sheba. But where Salt began to look thick was on the toast to the class of 1931, that had graduated the year before. Cannon took a little trouble with it and it went something like this:
“To that noble aggregation, which beat us by one year down life’s broad highway, the class of ’31 — may they always be right, but right or left, ’31. Where, my friends, does one find such distinction, such achievement, as in the class of ’31? I pause for a reply, not knowing where to look. Is highway construction our test of solid accomplishment? This outfit has pressed more bricks than Coxey’s Army. Is it architecture? Think of the buildings that are being held up by the class of ’31. Is it philanthropy? This outfit has panhandled more dimes than John D. Rockefeller would be able to give away the whole coming year. Is it agriculture? Think of the apples ’31 has peddled in the streets, and only a year out of school yet. Is it tonsoriology? A blind man could shave himself by the shine on the seat of these bastards’ pants. Is it—”
“I don’t care for that.”
“Salt, what have I said to offend you?”
“It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.”
“You mean my deep, mellifluous voice?”
“I mean your scoffing tone.”
“Are you by any chance taking up for these sons of bitches that showed not the least fraction of a human soul when we got here four years ago, that razzed us and taunted us and hazed us, that—”
“I don’t take up for ’31 at all. To hell with them! But if they want work, there’s still work to do—”
“Oh, yeah? Pray tell us.”
Then Cannon asked Salt what he was going to do when he got his dip. He said he was going with the Consolidated Engineering Company, but it was quite well known that Consol was owned by his uncle, and had contracts all over, specially wherever the government needed dredges. That got him the raspberry, and Cannon went on: “Here’s to Admiral Byrd!”
“Ray!”
“Babe Ruth!”
“Ray!”
“Jean Harlow!”
“Oh, boy!”
“President Hoover!”
“Hip, hip—”
“Morituri, te salutamus!”
But Salt had stood up when Mr. Hoover’s name was mentioned, and that was when Denny swung. There was quite a roughhouse, and I guess it was five or six o’clock when I got it quieted down and all of them thrown out. But along around ten, when the beer had worn off and we’d had something to eat, I lay down and kept thinking about it. “Denny, what was that he said? That sounded like Latin.”
“May be in the dictionary.”