‘You bounder, I’ll tweak your nose’ stuff, and all the rest of it?”
“I just finished reading that,” she said, excitedly.
She opened the book and read aloud:
“And allow me to say, sir, said the irascible Doctor Payne, that if I had been Tappleton or if I had been Slammer, I would have pulled your nose, sir, and the nose of every man in this company.”
She gave out with a loud, rippling laugh. “Didn’t think that was funny when you read it?”
“It’s been years since I read it,” said Jim. “We read that in high school, didn’t we?”
“I read it every year,” said Jill. “He was a great man. I would love to have known him.”
“I guess so,” said Jim. The he remembered an item from a class lecture. “He didn’t get along with his wife, did he?”
“He was a genius,” said Jill. “But his wife didn’t develop at all.”
“It’s funny though,” said Jim. “You’d think with all that he knew about human nature, he’d know how to pick a wife.”
“Sex is irrational,” she replied airily.
“Look at Thackeray, too,” said Jim.
“I don’t know anything about him,” said Jill.
“His wife was in an asylum.”
“Is that right?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Well I bet you could find a lot of examples of writers who get happily married too.”
“Sure. Uncle Arthur,” said Jim. They both laughed, though Jill tried to stop. She felt mean, laughing at Arthur.
At the store, Curley had the two boxes waiting. He packed groceries at the checkout counter, a beefy youth with a sleepy smile. Jim suspected that he had a crush on Florence, and figured she made quite practical use of his affections by assigning him to guard her groceries.
Jim went into the store proper to get some more items; then he had to wait at the checkout line. Idly he studied the different types of razor blades offered for sale on the back of the register. Then his eye caught Jill. She was looking at the pocket-book rack stretched across the front of the store. She leaned backwards to see the top titles, and occasionally would pull one off the shelf and thumb through it. She looked clean-limbed and pretty from the back. Her natural blonde hair was another characteristic she shared with Jack.
As he watched her, the thought struck Jim that, if his sister Florence had come to the store with a guy, she would have made a big production of walking up and down the aisles with him, oohing and aahing over everything. But not Jill. If she’d rather stay up front and look over the pocket books, that’s what she’d do. She was always on the level. Even in conversation. He reflected on what she said of Thackeray: “I don’t know anything about him.” If that were Florence, she would have made some comment about Vanity Fair, which she hadn’t read, and the man would have gone rushing into a discussion of Thackeray, only to discover five minutes later that she didn’t know anything more than the one fact about Vanity Fair.
When he got checked through the line, he went over to Jill and ran his fingernail across the back of her knee. She jumped, and turned, and asked, “What are you up to?”
“I was just admiring your legs.”
She half-smiled.
“They’re all right,” he said, “But you know me, Jill: I don’t go much for that cheap physical stuff.”
“Not much,” she said, her mouth tightening quickly.
He loaded the groceries into the car and they went to the Peppermint Stick for a soda. The ice cream parlor had red and white striped walls, and round marble tables with wire chairs, and the sodas served had two scoops of rich ice cream and were heaped with whipped cream. Each part of the soda had its own delight: the first pull on the straw brought the sweet liquid; then the whipped cream could be eaten away on one side of the hill, until the chocolate syrup and the ice cream were exposed; then the two scoops of ice cream could be patiently carved until the bottom of the glass was reached, where there was a full inch of residue of chocolate syrup.
“How’s school?” asked Jim.
“All right.” She went to Fordham also, but to the School of Education downtown, which was co-ed. No women were admitted as students on the main Bronx campus.
She probably knows about the suspension, Jim thought. Jack did, and he would have told her.
“I’ve been suspended you know.”
“Jack told me. I think it’s ridiculous. Over an old book! If they suspended everybody who hooked a book out of the library they wouldn’t have any students left. Downtown, some of the boys go in and cut the pages right out of the reference books with razor blades. He must be a crank, that Phelan.”
As she talked on with the sympathy he expected, Jim wanted to tell her more. He wanted to tell her the whole story, for Father Phelan had done more than suspend him. The priest had told him there was a “smoothness and cleverness” in his character that was “not fitting.” What it amounted to, Jim had concluded bitterly, was he had called him a sneak. It was the capstone to his increasing load of doubts about himself. “You’re not worth a shit,” as his father had put it graphically in his rage in the car that morning. There were so many doubts, so many fears that he wanted to talk about. He almost started. But he didn’t have the courage.
“What are you going to do now?” Jill asked.
“Take it easy for two weeks,” Jim replied. “What the heck. Don’t pass up a vacation.”
“Will you be back in school in time for the Freshman Prom?”
He thought for a moment. “Yeah. I guess so.”
She hoped he’d follow up on the subject, but he let it drop. He was probably taking Eva anyway.
Chapter 3
Jill came back to the house with Jim. When Mr. Meagher heard her voice, he left the television set and came out to greet her. “Ah, Jill,” he said. She went right to him, and kissed his cheek as she always did, and he grinned.
“You’re a high blossom,” he told her, “from a sweet tree.”
Jill loved it. She loved him too. And he’d do anything for her. Just the opposite of his attitude toward Eva. The father wouldn’t give Eva the time of day from an armful of watches. The Polock. She wasn’t even Polish, but he had decided she looked Polish.
“What have you got against the Polish?” Jim had asked him one time.
“You’d starve to death with them,” the father said. “When I was new in this country, I went out once with a Polock, and she brought me to the house, and opened the ice-box, and sure there wasn’t a damn thing on the five shelves, but an apple, and that with hair growing on it.”
That was the origin of his favorite name for Eva: Hairy Apple.
Jim grabbed his baseball glove and went off to a ballgame in the park, leaving his father with Jill. As he walked along the street, punching his fist into the pocket to soften the leather, he wondered how his father ever got around to asking out a Polish girl in the first place. He must certainly have been a different man in those days. And what would his father have been like on a date? Jim couldn’t even imagine it. For the girl it must have been like going out with a grizzly bear. But no, he would have been tender, as he was with Jill. He was so many contradictions, that man.
Chapter 4
When Jill left the Meaghers’, she walked across to her own yard in a happy mood. The ride with Jim had been fun; a talk with Florence had been interesting; and the visit with Mr. Meagher,