The Tight White Collar Read online

  “Now,” he said, and smiled at her. “What’s your name?”

  “Melissa Anne St. George,” she replied primly.

  Jess tossed his fountain pen down and leaned back in his chair.

  “Now don’t tell me that every time I talk to you I have to say all that,” he laughed.

  Suddenly he did not seem old at all, and Lisa laughed too.

  “No,” she said, “that was just for the record. You may call me Lisa if you want.”

  “I want,” he said, and picked up his pen again. When he had finished writing her name on the card he looked up. “Well, Lisa, what seems to be the trouble?”

  “Trouble?” she asked. And then she smiled. “Oh, no trouble, Doctor. I mean, I’m not sick or anything. I’m going to have a baby.”

  Jess Cameron looked down at the card in front of him and did not move.

  I knew it, he thought. I knew it the minute I saw her. But I’m never going to get used to it. Never. A child herself, and now this.

  As soon as he was able, he looked up at her. “Is that so?” he asked conversationally.

  “Well, at least I think so,” said Lisa and blushed a little. “I haven’t come around—I mean, I haven’t menstruated for three months.”

  “Yes,” said Jess. “Well, that’s usually a pretty good indication of something or other. Let’s find out.”

  While Lisa was undressing in the other room, Jess put out his cigarette.

  Christ! he thought. Seventeen years old. I wonder if the boy will marry her quietly or if there’ll be a stink. I hope to hell he’s no one from around here.

  Lisa lay on the narrow table and suffered what she later described to Chris as agonies of embarrassment while the doctor poked and prodded and put his cold stethoscope on her.

  He was nice, though, she thought later. He didn’t stare at her at all while his hands were on her. Finally he straightened and, keeping his back to her, went to the small sink in the room and pulled off his rubber glove.

  “You may get dressed,” he told her.

  When she had her clothing on and was seated next to his desk again, he said, “Lisa, you’re going to have a baby, all right. In about six more months, I’d say.”

  But he sounded so sad, thought Lisa. And all she wanted was for him to be as happy as she was. She began to figure mentally.

  “It must have happened practically the first time we were together,” she said at last.

  “Lisa, listen to me,” said Jess. “Does he—does the father know?”

  “Well, yes. I mean, he’s not sure but neither was I until just now.”

  “Is he willing to marry you?” asked Jess.

  “Of course he’s willing to marry me,” cried Lisa angrily. “He loves me and I love him. With us, Dr. Cameron, it isn’t a question of having to get married. Oh, I’ve heard plenty about girls and boys having to get married, but not Chris and me. We love each other. We want to get married.”

  “Tell me this boy’s name,” said Jess tiredly. “His name, where he works. Everything.”

  “His name is Christopher Pappas. He is seventeen years old and he works for his father and mother in the fruit store at Cooper’s Mills,” said Lisa as if she were reciting a lesson in a classroom. Then she added, “He lives in the house behind the store with his family and his father and mother hate me and my mother hates Chris.”

  Jess shielded his eyes with his hand as he wrote. “Does he get paid for the work he does for his parents?” he asked.

  “Of course,” said Lisa proudly. “He gets sixty cents an hour. That’s what men get when they first go into the mills, you know. And Chris’s folks pay him the same thing because they want to keep him at the store.”

  “I see,” said Jess. “Lisa,” he said, “you tell this boy tonight. Tell him that you were here and that we’re sure.”

  “Well, of course, I’ll tell him,” said Lisa, not understanding the man at all. “He’s just dying to hear. I promised that I’d stop by the store and let him know as soon as I was sure myself. We even worked out a sort of code in case his mother or father is around. If one of them is there and I am, I’m to ask him for a package of Wrigley’s spearmint gum, and if I’m not I’m to go to the fountain and order a small Coke. So now, of course, I’ll order the gum. If one of his parents is around, I mean.”

  “And Lisa,” said Jess, as if she had not spoken, “if you run into any trouble at all, either with the boy or his family, you are to come back here to me at once. Do you understand? At once.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lisa and all of a sudden she felt like crying. She didn’t feel warm or excited any more at all. “Yes, Dr. Cameron,” she said and walked out the door.

  Chris reacted as Lisa had known he would.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “I love you and you love me and we’re going to have a baby. So what?”

  He put his arm around her shoulders and said again, defiantly, “So what?” as if daring the world to tell him so anything, and Lisa was overwhelmed with love.

  The trouble, when it came, was between Irene and Mrs. Pappas.

  “A child!” screamed Irene. “You, Lisa? A child? With this nobody? This shopkeeper?”

  Lisa, Chris and the two mothers sat in Irene’s living room. Lisa held Chris’s hand and looked around and she could hardly believe that just that morning she had thought that this room was perfectly comfortable and attractive. She supposed that it was still all right, in its way, but it just wasn’t the kind of room she liked any more. The wallpaper had a dark tan background with small, lighter tan figures printed on it. Lisa had often wondered what the figures represented. Sometimes they looked like rose arbors in a garden and sometimes like the faces of old men, and sometimes like church windows. The furniture was covered with maroon plush, like the seats in the coaches on the Boston and Maine Railroad, and Lisa, sitting in one of her mother’s living room chairs, felt slightly sick and a little scared.

  “If she’s that way,” said Mrs. Pappas, “it’s because she led my Chris on so he didn’t know what he was doing. How many times I told him, ‘Chris,’ I said, ‘don’t play around with no tramps.’”

  “Lisa isn’t a tramp,” said Chris quietly. “She’s a nice girl.”

  “Led him on!” yelled Irene so loud that Lisa almost said, “For heaven’s sake, Mother, remember who you are!”

  “Led him on! Let me tell you something, Mrs. Pappas, my Lisa wasn’t brought up like that. She’s a good decent girl. A young lady.”

  “Brought up! Huh! With you in a beer saloon every chance you get, tell me how good she was brought up?”

  “You filthy foreigner,” cried Irene. “You in that cockroach-infested store of yours, raising up a son to violate a young girl.”

  “He didn’t,” said Lisa and began to cry. “He didn’t do that. I love him.”

  “She’s a little tramp!”

  “If he were any good she wouldn’t be in this fix!”

  “She asked for it. Her kind always does.”

  “God only knows how many other girls he’s done this to!”

  “My Chris never had no girls! He always stayed home or in the store minding his own business until that little hot britches kid of yours started in twitching her tail at him!”

  “Enough, you vile-tongued harridan!”

  “Ain’t you somethin’ with them big words, huh? Yeah, yeah, Mrs. High and Mighty herself. Can’t even hang on to her man. You drunken bum!”

  “It is always the ignorant,” said Irene, calm at last, “who look down upon their better-educated neighbors.”

  “Educated your ass! That’s a good one. Educated by a pimp like old man Durand. Well all I can say is that you learned good, Mrs. Fancy Pants. Real good. And you taught your kid all the things you learned from that crook.”

  Lisa and Chris were married. In church. With
double rings and a priest and three organ selections because Mrs. McGovern, the organist, always played three selections at all weddings for which she was paid five dollars. Irene stayed on after the ceremony just long enough to wish the newlyweds luck and then she headed for the Happy Hour Café. People at the Happy Hour knew Irene for the lady she was. At the Happy Hour, no one ever said a mean word to her. They listened to her stories by the hour and they never questioned a word.

  The Pappases did not put in an appearance at the wedding at all, and Cooper’s Mills wondered and whispered.

  “Wonder where Irene kept the shotgun hid all during Mass?”

  “It won’t last a year. Marriages like that never do.”

  “Well, it’s too late now. Imagine, a priest and everything. They can never get a divorce now. It’s too late.”

  “I never thought Lisa was that kind of girl.”

  “Well, it don’t surprise me none.”

  “A regular little hot pants bitch.”

  “And Chris Pappas. What a sonofabitch he turned out to be. And him so smart in school and all.”

  “It’s a wise child knows its own father. I wonder if Lisa’s kid’ll know.”

  “She’s beginning to show already.”

  “I noticed.”

  Chris and Lisa rented a two-room apartment on River Street in Cooper’s Mills. The apartment was in a building that had the subtly decayed quality peculiar to buildings in the manufacturing towns of northern New England. There was no real reason why the board of health should have condemned the place, for the building had the required number of exits and the proper number of fire extinguishers in the halls, but there was a feeling of age about the place, a feeling of rottenness that came from the sagging of hidden sills and mildewed clapboards, and over everything, there was the smell of aged wallpaper and faulty drains.

  Lisa and Chris had an apartment in the back of the building so that they had a view of the river, and sometimes Lisa sat in front of her kitchen window and pretended that she was in a palace and that the river was the Rhine and that Chris was not going to come home from the job he’d taken at the factories after his folks put him out, but that he would be returning from an afternoon of hunting on his own private game preserve.

  When it was time for the baby to be born they had to put the new crib against a wall in the kitchen and then there didn’t seem to be room to turn around anywhere, but Lisa and Chris didn’t mind. Living together, being married, was just like playing house except that the game never ended and neither one of them ever had to leave to go somewhere else. Jess Cameron delivered the baby, a girl, three days after Thanksgiving 1941, and Chris took Lisa home from the hospital on the same Sunday morning that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

  “I’ll have to go,” he told Lisa. “I guess everybody will before it’s over.”

  “Yes,” said Lisa, not caring, really, about anything that was happening some place as far off as Hawaii. “But not today, darling, not today.”

  “But soon,” replied Chris, unsmiling, “very soon.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Chris,” said Lisa, “can’t you think of anything besides a silly old war some place? We’ve got a brand-new baby to think about. You don’t plan to rush off to Pearl Harbor this minute, do you?”

  Chris looked down at the little face inside the pink bunting.

  “No,” he said at last. “Not this very minute.”

  Chapter V

  Years later at the state university, a professor in the education department had asked Chris why he wanted to be a schoolteacher at all.

  “There has to be a reason, Chris,” the professor had said. “All of us have to have a reason and a good one, too. One that will stand up when the going gets rough as it always does sooner or later. No one goes into this racket because of the money because there’s no money here. And that crap about doing one’s bit for mankind is also pretty lame. If a man has a big yen for that sort of thing he could join the Salvation Army and have a much easier time of it. Tell me, Chris. What reason are you going to give yourself?”

  “It was the war,” said Chris. “I decided during the war.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t ask you when you decided. I asked you why.”

  But Chris could not tell him. At first he hadn’t been able to tell Lisa, either. When he had decided that he wanted to become a teacher he had simply written her a V-Mail and told her of his plans. Her answer had come back that she thought it was wonderful and that with the GI Bill there wouldn’t be any problem at all and wasn’t it terrific that at last they’d be able to get out of Cooper’s Mills.

  “I’m so proud of you, darling,” Lisa had written. “You’ll go to college and become a teacher and everything is going to be wonderful.”

  But it wasn’t the threat of Cooper’s Mills and the factories that had influenced Chris. It was something else, something that had taken a long time to happen and end and crystallize into decision, and Chris couldn’t tell anyone because he couldn’t remember exactly when or how it had come about.

  The town, he remembered, could have once looked like a great many of the towns in northern New England except that there wasn’t much of anything left of this particular town that looked like anything at all. It had been late afternoon and they had been trudging through the countryside since before dawn. They were lost. The lieutenant knew it, Sgt. Christopher Pappas knew it, the whole goddamned platoon knew it. There wasn’t a sign of regiment, battalion or company anywhere. The road curved on, uneven with frozen ruts. The men had ceased to be tough infantrymen, eager for another crack at the Germans. They were ugly and tired and beginning to turn on each other.

  “Listen, Lieutenant,” said Chris, “you can see they’re fagged. It might be a good idea to stop for chow.”

  “After we get around the next curve,” replied the lieutenant.

  So they marched on over the broken road. Chris listened to the scrape of combat boots against the rough ground and he heard the mutterings of the men behind him.

  Suddenly the road straightened and sloped downward and there was a little town in front of them. Or what was left of a town. Every building that had not been destroyed altogether had some part of it smashed; roof or window or wall.

  “For it’s Hi-Hi-Hee for the Field Artilleree—” sang the lieutenant under his breath as he looked around.

  They all gathered at the foot of what had once been the main street.

  “Let’s eat,” called the lieutenant and the men headed for what was left of the town church. There were only three walls standing but these offered some protection from the cold wind.

  “Gonna snow again,” said one of the men.

  “So what’re ya bitchin’? We’ll all go skiing.” He pronounced it “sheeing” and laughed at his own joke. “Get it?” he asked when no one else laughed. “She. You know. She. Dame. Female. Broad.”

  No one even smiled.

  “Why don’t you shut up, O’Brien?” asked one of the men.

  O’Brien shrugged and sat down on the hard ground.

  They opened K-rations and ate. They smoked. And during the half hour that they sat there no one had anything to say. Chris looked at the broken walls of the church and wondered if once the spire had risen straight and white and plain or if it had been topped with a gilded cross.

  Lutherans, aren’t they? he asked himself. Aren’t most Germans Lutherans? Anyway, it doesn’t feel as if anyone had ever burned incense or genuflected here.

  “Off your butts,” called the lieutenant.

  The men stood up and fell into a semblance of a rank and started to walk.

  Chris heard the artillery ahead of them now, very faintly, from miles ahead, but he knew it was there.

  When the next curve in the road straightened, they saw a small settlement of six or eight houses spread out before them.

  Peaceful, thoug
ht Chris, as if the war had never passed this way at all.

  Smoke came from the chimneys of the houses and somewhere a dog barked.

  “Jesus!” muttered the lieutenant. “Just like Currier and Ives.”

  “Like Vermont, right around Thanksgivin’,” said someone else.

  “I can’t help thinkin’ that my old woman would say that it’s a hell of a ways to the nearest store,” said another.

  “You, Kenyon,” the lieutenant signaled a man. “Come over here.”

  Kenyon was a corporal and, according to the lieutenant, the best goddamned scout in the United States Army.

  “Go take a walk around and see what you can see,” said the lieutenant.

  Kenyon made his way carefully toward the first of the little white houses while the men who stayed behind waited tensely, hands suddenly pliant and ready for action on their rifles. When Kenyon returned he did so quickly, walking upright, not bothering to tread carefully or to take cover.

  “Nobody there but farmers,” he reported, “cookin’ supper. And let me add that what they’re cookin’ smells a helluva lot better and more appetizin’ than what we just ate.”

  The lieutenant was chewing his thumbnail. His eyes darted from one farmhouse to the next and Chris Pappas felt a sudden hatred, tinged with pity, rise within him.

  The lieutenant is going bugs, thought Chris. He’s at the point now where he sees a fugitive German soldier in every farmhouse and he lives in a world where every hausfrau is a traitor. Poor bastard. He can’t even look at a scene full of peace without thinking of the war.

  “Too goddamn good to be true,” muttered the lieutenant.

  “I’m tellin’ you, Lieutenant,” said Kenyon, hurt.

  “I know, I know,” said the lieutenant. “I’m not doubting you, Kenyon, it’s just this goddamned feeling I’ve got.”

  “The artillery passed this way,” said Kenyon, “and even they left this place alone.”

  “I know,” repeated the lieutenant and turned to Chris. “Come with me,” he said. “The rest of you wait here.”