Savage Streets Read online

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  Every man, and every community, has its breaking point. This is the arresting and powerful idea which is examined by William P. McGivern in his new novel, Savage Streets.

  The suburban development of Faircrest had seemed a model of contemporary values, pleasures and problems, its young home owners sane and intelligent — until the unexpected happened. Then John Farrell’s son began to steal, the Wards’ boy lied in terror about a fight he had been in at school and a German Luger disappeared from the Detweillers’ home. It became apparent that an ugly and mysterious influence was operating within the peaceful blocks of Faircrest.

  The adults recognized the danger signals. It was obvious their children’s values and safety were being threatened. This was a time for calmness, for issues to be clearly defined. But the parents failed to realize that their own values were also put to test in this explosive situation. A conviction of righteousness swept through the community like a grass fire, and with it an impatience with the law and a disregard for the rights of anyone beyond the threatened portals of Faircrest. What man, what individual life is ever strong enough to survive such a spell of riot?

  Here, in a tense and unusual book, is a sobering picture of what could happen in any modern American community.

  * * *

  William P. McGivernChapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  * * *

  William P. McGivern

  Savage Streets

  TO

  The Honorable Thomas Carrington Gawthrop

  FOR FRIENDSHIP AND ASSISTANCE

  Chapter One

  John Farrell and Sam Ward got off the train together at Rosedale, a suburban station twenty-three miles from New York City. As they joined the crowd moving toward the commuters’ parking lot, Sam Ward took Farrell’s arm and said, “Now let me just sum this thing up, okay John?”

  For the past half hour — the normal running time between Grand Central and Rosedale — Ward had been complaining in a random but energetic fashion about the golf dub both men belonged to; and now, Farrell thought, he obviously felt the good executive’s need to recap his thinking. And Farrell also realized there was no graceful way of escaping this; Ward’s hand was on his arm with the authority of an arresting policeman.

  “We’re a small club and a new club, granted,” Ward said, steering Farrell along by the elbow. Everyone was in a hurry at this hour of day, the crowd streaming like water toward wives and cars waiting in the parking lot, but Ward kept himself and Farrell abreast of the current without disrupting the continuity of his comment. “Okay, we’re small and new, period. That doesn’t mean we have to be cheap, does it?”

  “Well, not necessarily,” Farrell said.

  “Of course, when I say ‘cheap’ I’m not talking about money or anything physical, you understand. I’m talking about tone.” Ward’s voice was loud and belligerent, which was in keeping with the way he walked, looked and thought; he was stocky, red-faced and pugnacious, a blunt, no-nonsense sort of person who wore a black Homburg and Chesterfield overcoat and seemed to be rushing eagerly toward middle age, impatient for the responsibilities and perquisites of seniority. In a few more years. Ward (he was now thirty-two) might turn into an authentic character, Farrell thought. Old Man Ward — “the Old Man shook hell out of the St. Louis office on his last trip. Did you hear about it?”

  “What do you mean by tone?” Farrell asked him.

  “Damn it, you know what I mean. Little things. Members leaving caddie carts piled up in front of the pro shop while they go down to the locker for a beer. Kids taking pop bottles to their wading pond. Aside from the danger of broken glass, it makes the place look like a junk yard. Third, the rules about dress, as you know only too well, are either laughed at or ignored. Ties and jackets in the restaurant and lounge, that’s the regulation, and it doesn’t seem too much to ask, if you ask me. But you know as well as I do that half the members wander around both those places in sports shirts. And here’s another thing: some of the waiters are getting familiar as hell lately. And it’s the members who encourage that crap who’re chiefly to blame. You know some people think it’s great to have waiters call them by their first names and kid them about hang-overs and that sort of thing. They think it proves they’re nice guys. Well, you either have a well-run club, or you have something else altogether. Now take the Detweillers, for instance. They’re friends of yours, right?”

  “Chicky and Bill? Sure.”

  “Okay, they’re friends of mine, too, but they treat the club like a playpen. Every time they get a few extra drinks it’s the same story. College songs, arms around waiters, both of them behaving like a pair of drunken teen-agers. Hell, I’ll take a drink with the next guy, but my policy has always been, if you can’t handle the stuff then leave it strictly alone. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Well, it’s a good policy. I understand that much.”

  “Did you hear about Chicky the other night?”

  “No, what did she do?”

  “Climbed up on the bar after a few Scotches and went to sleep. And Mac, our idiot bartender, crossed her hands over her chest and put a cherry in her mouth. Isn’t that cute? Isn’t that a nice sight for someone coming in with his family, say, for a drink before dinner? I tell you, we’ve got to take up some slack while there’s still time. I know Rome wasn’t built in a day, but one day a couple Romans got together and started to build it. And that’s what we’ve got to do. Get moving before it’s too late.”

  John Farrell laughed as they moved along with the crowd toward the end of the platform. The evening light was pale and dim, and the cold salt-sharpened wind off the Sound whipped his topcoat about his legs.

  “What’s funny?” Ward asked him.

  Farrell said, “Nothing,” but in fact Ward’s comment about Rome had raised a preposterous image in his mind, that of two togaed figures standing on a lonesome and wind-swept plain somewhere in the middle of Italy. He invented some dialogue for them: “Well, we can’t build it in a day, damn it!” There was the pessimist harrying the man of vision. “But we can start, can’t we?” And that was Sam Ward, one day to be a consul of Rome, and one day (even more certainly) to be a vice president of Texoho Oil Company, a vast industrial complex he presently served in an important minor capacity.

  “My idea is to get the interested people together in an informal committee,” Ward said, glancing about the graveled parking lot for his car. “We’ll decide what we want done, and then make sure it is done. Okay, John?”

  “Let me think about it.” Farrell saw the specter of committee work rising out of Ward’s dissatisfactions; nights spent in slaying miniature dragons, of hashing the obvious to pieces, of too much coffee and Scotch, and a great deal of censorious talk about abuses and indiscretions committed by absent members and their families. “Okay?” he said, pulling his arm gently from Ward’s grip. “We’ll think it over, okay?”

  “Well, sure,” Ward said doubtfully. “But we don’t want to let things get too far out of hand. Bad habits have a funny way of turning into traditions, you know.” He smiled in surprise at his epigram. “Hey, that would be the way to put it, I think. Tactfully, I mean.”

  “That’s an idea,” Farrell said.

  Sam Ward’s wife honked for him and he turned and waved toward her dark head. “Can we give you a lift, John?”

  “No, I’ll walk. It’s
the only exercise I get. Say hello to Grace for me, will you?”

  “Hey, you’re seeing us tonight, remember?”

  Farrell hadn’t remembered, but he nodded and said, “Sure thing. See you later.”

  “Right.” Ward waved good-by to him, and went sturdily across the lot to his car, holding the brim of his Homburg against the gusts of wind sweeping down the sides of the train. The crowd thinned out quickly in well-rehearsed patterns: wives were kissed, cars circled the lot with military precision, and by the time Farrell had gone down the wooden steps to the sidewalk the Express was pulling away from the station and only a few stragglers were left on the platform.

  The village of Rosedale was peaceful and picturesque in the falling evening light. Everything seemed calm and attractive and permanent; the discreetly expensive shops (for cheeses and wines and riding apparel), the white clapboard church, the colonial courthouse with well-tended lawns and privet hedge, the small square, the equestrian statue of General Grant — all of this was something more than real estate, it was a way of life kept sacrosanct by rigid zoning, preserved in sentiment by the old families who still maintained the big homes on the south shore of the Island. This was the oldest section of the Township; there were no hamburger stands here, no ice cream palaces or noisy barrooms, no garishly illuminated real estate offices. Everything from the burnished whipping post behind the courthouse to the extravagant maples along the main street had been grimly held against the forces of progress.

  When Farrell crossed Whiting Boulevard a few minutes later he entered a world of split-levels and ranch houses, of a mile of shops that modestly called itself “miraculous,” of gas stations and steak houses ablaze with neon, the world of the middle-class commuter, new, mortgaged and efficient, with television antennae flying like pennants above every man’s castle.

  A half mile beyond Whiting Boulevard, Farrell came to the area known as Hayrack. Now he was nearly home. Hayrack was an incongruously run-down neighborhood, a square mile of deteriorating houses and shops pressed in tightly between the Faircrest development and the commercial section of Rosedale. It was not quite a slum area, but the streets were poorly lit, and there were several pool halls and a number of cheap, noisy barrooms. Hayrack had been a respectable, lower-middle-class community when the larger homes on the south shore had dominated the area. It had supplied the labor that kept the big houses running gracefully; maids and chauffeurs, stable boys and gardeners, all the essential props of privilege had come from Hayrack. When the big houses ceased to function, so had Hayrack. Now everyone said the whole area had to go; the land was needed for decent housing and the bars and pool halls were a disgrace. But so far nothing had been done. Hayrack continued to exist, held together by the complicated tendrils of politics, taxation and ethnic loyalties.

  Farrell always experienced a certain tension as he walked through Hayrack. The street comers were dim and the alleys full of heavy shadows but his uneasiness was not a physical thing; he simply felt out of place in this neighborhood, a stranger, an alien.

  After Hayrack he followed a street bordering the ninth fairway of the golf course, and this brought him to the arched entrance of the Faircrest development. There was a sentry box to the left of the arch, and beside this architectural irrelevancy stood a stone column with the name Faircrest spelled out in colored pebbles. Rows of willow trees stretched out in a long semicircle on either side of the archway, screening the development from the highway with soft, drooping branches.

  Farrell passed under the arch and walked between the masses of rhododendron flanking the graveled entrance. He turned right at the first intersection. The homes he passed were identical in their snug, inexpensive feel of luxury; they stood on quarter-acre, well-tended lots, and came equipped with carports, barbecue pits, basement workshops, television antennae and combination washing and drying machines. In the twilight their picture windows gleamed warmly against the coming darkness. The scene was comfortable and familiar to his eyes. Glancing at the cars along the curbing he knew who was home, and who had missed a train or got tied up in the city. Some children were kicking a football around in the street and he recognized Billy Sims, Bobby Detweiller and Junior Norton. As he passed them the football bounced off the roof of a parked car and rolled along the sidewalk to his feet. He bent and scooped it up with one hand.

  “Okay, who wants to go down under a long one?” He stepped off the sidewalk to the street. “Were trailing by three points, there’s time for just one play. Who’s going to be the hero?”

  “Me, Mr. Farrell, me!” Bobby Detweiller shouted, pushing Junior Norton and Billy Sims aside. They protested shrilly, but Bobby was already trotting down the street. “Come on, throw it, Mr. Farrell,” he yelled. “Make it a good long one.”

  As he drew back his arm to throw Farrell suddenly experienced an odd but directionless nostalgia for something he was at a loss to name or define. It was a confusing instant; there was the cold wind on his face, the touch of the smooth leather football in his hand, and an abrupt sense of emptiness and futility; it was all so long ago, he thought, and this was the first concept that isolated itself from the curious welter of self-pity. So damn long ago. For no understandable reason he thought of Union Station in Chicago at Christmas time, with the great illuminated tree centering the concourse and the music of carols booming against the high, vaulted ceiling. That was what Chicago looked like when you got off the University train for the Christmas vacation. The sweet, exciting music, the masses of people, the girls with pink cheeks and slim legs, the young men bigger and more confident than when they’d gone away in the fall, everyone shouting and happy in the rush for home.

  “Throw it, Mr. Farrell!” Bobby Detweiller cried.

  Farrell lobbed the ball carefully. The pass was good; it hit the boy’s upraised hands.

  He dropped it and for some reason this pleased Farrell. Just like his old man, he thought.

  “I couldn’t see it,” Bobby Detweiller said plaintively. “And it was too high. Throw me another one, Mr. Farrell. Just one more, please.”

  “It’s too dark, I’m afraid. We’ll try it again tomorrow. Where’s Jimmy?”

  “I don’t know,” Junior Norton said in his quick, eager little voice. He was thin and slenderly built, with his father’s dark good looks and cautious eyes. The Nortons had moved to Faircrest only a few months ago, and Farrell didn’t know Wayne Norton too well. He worked in a bank, and Farrell had the impression that he was vigilantly scenting the wind for the acceptable prejudices and taboos in his new environment. He said little, smiled a great deal, and was careful to take a straddling position in most discussions or arguments. Some of this wariness had obviously transmitted itself to his son, Wayne Jr., for the boy behaved with the youngsters in the development like a small edition of his father.

  Billy Sims said, “Jimmy can’t play football any more. He’s studying or something.”

  Farrell glanced at him closely; it was too dark to see the expression on his face, but there was a suggestion of illicit excitement in his voice. Farrell said, “What do you mean ‘Jimmy can’t play football any more’? Is he in the doghouse with his mother?”

  Bobby Detweiller pushed the Sims boy from behind and said, “He doesn’t know anything, Mr. Farrell. He just blabbers all the time.”

  “I do not,” Billy Sims cried and turned angrily on Detweiller’s son. “Jimmy told me he can’t play any more. He’s my friend, not yours. I should know, shouldn’t I?”

  “He’s my friend just as much as he is yours,” Bobby Detweiller said very loudly, for this wasn’t true; Jimmy and Billy Sims had been playmates for a year or so before the Detweillers had moved to Faircrest.

  “Well, let’s not quibble about it,” Farrell said and patted both boys on their shoulders. “I’ll ask Jimmy and settle the mystery myself. Take it easy now.” Farrell waved a good-by to the group of boys and went up the walk to his home. He hung up his hat and coat and turned into the small study that adjoined the foyer
. The room was dark except for the television screen. His ten-year-old daughter, Angey, was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, her face pale and solemn in the faint illumination from the TV set. The program which held her transfixed was an animated cartoon featuring the clown named Boffo. Boffo’s reason for being, as nearly as Farrell could judge, was to sneak up behind people and strike them over the head with a huge club. Then he ran away to hide.

  Angey didn’t turn her eyes from the screen. She said automatically, “Hi, Daddy. Please don’t turn on the light.”

  “Just for a second.” He turned on a lamp and lifted the lid of the ice bucket. There was no ice. “You want to do me a favor, honey?”

  “Oh, Daddy!”

  “I’ll keep my eye on Boffo for you. You run along and get me some ice.”

  “Oh, all right,” she said, sliding from the sofa with childish grace, fluid and awkward at once.

  Farrell turned down the television set. In theory this room was to have been his retreat and sanctum, a place for tying trout flies and cleaning guns, a haven for the solitary drink and private thoughts. In fact, however, it was the family sitting room where Barbara sewed, Angey played her records and Jimmy staged war games with batteries of remote-controlled tanks and cannon. The nominal living room, carpeted from wall to wall, and featuring a picture window and working fireplace, was used only for parties. He heard Barbara’s step on the stairs. She looked into the study and smiled at him in surprise. “I didn’t hear you come in. I thought Angey was watching TV in here by herself.”

  “I sent her for some ice.”

  She kissed him and gave him a quick hug. “I’m just off to pick up Mrs. Simpson. We’ve got a date tonight, you know.”

  “Yes, I rode out with Sam. He reminded me.”

  “Well, we’re on a kind of tight schedule. You’d better shower. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  “Where’s Jimmy?”