Savage Streets Read online

  “Upstairs.” She hesitated, then said, “He’s on a scholarly kick lately.”

  “What’s the matter, honey?” Farrell had just noticed the tense little frown on his wife’s forehead. She wasn’t a worrier and this particular frown, like that of a nearsighted person narrowing his eyes for better vision, was always an indication of trouble. “Anything wrong?”

  “I’ve got to rush. You get showered, okay?”

  When the door closed behind her, Farrell rubbed a hand slowly over the back of his neck. Angey returned with the ice bucket and asked if she could play her records. Farrell said all right and made himself a mild whiskey and water. Then he went upstairs and stopped at the doorway of his son’s room. Jimmy was hunched over his desk, the light from a reading lamp shadowing his small, alert face.

  “Man at work, eh?” Farrell said. “How goes it?”

  “Everything’s fine. Dad.” Jimmy glanced sideways at him, his eyes shadowed by the lamp behind his head. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  Farrell sat on the edge of Jimmy’s bed and looked around the room. “I don’t know what else we could fit in here,” he said. Most of the available wall space was occupied with tanks of tropical fish and Jimmy’s cigar box collection. In addition, there was a cage of parakeets, two dismantled radios, a gum-dispensing machine and several boxes of picture albums and business ledgers which Jimmy had bought at an auction in Hayrack. He glanced at Jimmy’s desk and saw an open notebook covered with doodles and ticktacktoe games. “How come you’ve slacked off on football, by the way?”

  “I don’t know. I got tired of it, I guess.” Jimmy drew a circle on the paper and began shading it with the broad tip of his pencil. He seemed disturbed by the conversation. “I’m not good at football,” he said, his voice rising and breaking childishly. “I couldn’t play it any good. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “No, of course not. But I understand what Billy Sims meant now. He said you couldn’t play and I assumed your mother had clamped down for some reason or other.”

  Jimmy glanced quickly at him. “How come you were talking to Billy about me?”

  “Well, I saw the boys outside and asked where you were. Anyway, I think you’re too young to decide whether you’re good, bad or indifferent at any sport. Play for fun, that’s enough for the moment. By the time you get to prep school, you’ll probably know if you’re any good or not.” Farrell glanced at his watch. He knew he should be getting ready for the Wards’ party, but he did not like to leave his son in this cheerless mood.

  “You know, maybe we should take in a few pro football games this fall,” he said. “You’ll see men who’re paid a lot of money to play make a foolish mistake every now and then. I’m serious. They miss blocks and drop passes just the way you boys do. They’re not perfect, and they’ve been playing the game for years. So you shouldn’t worry about making a mistake or two. It happens to the best. So how about it? Would you like me to pick up some tickets tomorrow?”

  “All right,” Jimmy said, staring at the circle he had shaded with his pencil.

  “You don’t sound excited about it.”

  “Well, gosh, I said all right, didn’t I?”

  “It’s a deal then.” Farrell walked down the hallway to his bedroom and put his drink down on the night table. Barbara had laid out his dinner jacket on his bed, and he remembered then that the Wards’ party was in honor of Mr. Hunter, one of the directors of the Faircrest development. They were dining at the country club, and on the train two mornings ago Ward had said, “Mr. Hunter rates a black tie, I guess.” The inference that his friends might not rate a black tie had not been allowed to hang awkwardly in the air. Ward had underscored it with a bold flourish. “If it were just our regular gang I wouldn’t bother,” he had said, shaking out his newspaper. “But with Mr. Hunter putting in an appearance, it’s a little bit special.”

  Farrell took off his coat and tie, and stretched out on Barbara’s bed, adjusting his position so that his shoes rested on the footstead rather than the spread. He was tall enough to do this without difficulty; he was over six feet, and except for an additional eight or ten pounds he was very much as he had been fifteen years ago, with big arms and shoulders, a deep chest and narrow hips. Farrell had a long, angular face, dark gray eyes and brown hair cut close. The normal cast of his features was almost grave, but there was a humor about his eyes which frequently encouraged people to tell him their problems. His nickname in college had been Uncle; even then he had been a good listener.

  Farrell glanced at the bedside clock. Six-thirty. The room was pleasantly warm, and the color scheme of grays and blues was restful. They had splurged a bit here, with wall to wall carpeting, and two handsome old walnut chests to supplement the built-in closet space. It was a very comfortable room, and Farrell rather wished he didn’t have to get up. He punched the pillow into a more comfortable position under his head and took a sip from his drink. It would have been agreeable to close his eyes and relax completely for a few minutes, but he could not anesthetize a nagging speculation as to what was behind the tense little frown on Barbara’s forehead. He knew that particular frown very well. It was different from her expression when the children were ill, or when she was working on her accounts, or when she was exasperated with him for playing an extra nine holes of golf on Saturday and leaving her to cope with the children and preparations for a party. This particular frown was different; it meant she was up against something she couldn’t handle, a problem she saw no way of solving.

  Farrell had seen this frown the first day they had met, and now, sipping a drink in the quiet bedroom they had shared for years, his thoughts drifted back to that time...

  He had called the Walker home from Philadelphia, saying hesitantly, “This is Lieutenant Farrell, John Farrell, that is. I called because I knew David Walker, he was in my platoon and I thought...”

  That was as far as he had got; her excited voice cut him off. “Yes, of course, Lieutenant. David wrote us about you. Darn! Dad isn’t in just now. He’ll be so eager to talk to you. Where are you now?”

  “In Philadelphia.”

  “Dad’s gone to Pottstown for the cattle auction. He’ll be so disappointed he missed you.”

  “Well, I could call later.”

  “That would be wonderful.” He had heard her catch her breath. “But look! I know you must have all sorts of plans of your own, but could you possibly come out and spend the night with us? Dad would be so pleased. Could you squeeze it in? Please?”

  “Well, I’d like to very much but my schedule is pretty tight. I’m supposed to be in Chicago tomorrow.”

  “I shouldn’t be trying to pressure you this way. If you could call Dad later that would be wonderful.”

  “Well, actually, I could probably make it all right,” he had said. That hadn’t been the truth; he was due in Chicago the next day to see an advertising agency about a job, and changing his plans meant giving up what in those days had been a very precious plane ticket. But he had not been able to resist the wistfulness in her voice.

  The afternoon he met Barbara for the first time had been in 1945. She was waiting for him when he got off the train in Westchester, Pennsylvania, a slim, twenty-year-old girl in a blue tweed coat, a rather plain girl (he had thought then) with a smooth forehead, gravely dark eyes and brown hair cropped close to her small head. On the drive to her father’s farm they had talked of gas rationing (the Walkers had been lucky; they had had an agricultural quota) and the beauty of the countryside, the purples and reds and yellows of the dying season. “This is what I missed,” he remembered that he said to her. “This kind of an American fall. These colors.”

  “Not hot dogs and the chance to boo the umpire?” She had turned her head to smile tentatively at him, and he saw that she wasn’t so plain after all. Some women were only beautiful in repose, he had learned; but there were women with a more exciting kind of beauty, with faces that came alive with the business of living. She was that sort.


  “I guess I was an odd-ball,” he had said. The fields of late fall stretched away from the road like a calmly rolling sea, and a stand of trees on a low hill looked as if a fire were raging through their branches.

  They spoke little after that, but the silence was comfortable. At a traffic light he had lighted a cigarette for her and she had taken it from him with the scrubbed hand of a child, thin brown fingers and rosy unpainted fingernails. That’s what she had reminded him of then, with her spindly legs and slender body, a child with sad eyes.

  The Walker home was old and sturdy, with fieldstone walls and narrow windows. Leaves were falling that afternoon, he remembered, twisting slowly through the cold blue air and settling with whispering sounds on the hardening ground.

  Mr. Walker was tall and handsome with dark eyes and prematurely gray hair. He did not look like a dairy farmer; with his pink cheeks and light hair he looked more like a college senior made up to portray a character in a class play.

  Dinner was served after several rounds of cocktails, and by the time they returned to the living room Mr. Walker was drunk in a casual, affable fashion. Barbara left them alone and they sat before the fireplace with flames from the apple-log fire shining brightly on the dark beams above their heads. Mr. Walker brought a bottle of cognac and two brandy snifters from the sideboard and said, “I think we might drink this to my son, David, Lieutenant.”

  Then Mr. Walker poured himself another brandy and said, “I would appreciate anything you can tell me about David’s death, Lieutenant — anything, that is, which won’t give you pain.”

  Farrell described young David Walker’s death. It had been a routine death, if any death under fire could be called routine, but Mr. Walker had obviously been gratified by his account. He had stirred himself with an effort to pour a drink. “I’m most grateful to you. You have given me great solace,” he had said.

  A little later Mr. Walker was asleep and Farrell was wondering uneasily if he should try to get him to bed. But Barbara returned then, and this was when he had first seen the tense little frown on her forehead. She hadn’t apologized for her father. She had said, “I’ll take care of him, please don’t worry. I know your talk has done him a lot of good.”

  “There wasn’t much I could tell him. David died well — that was all I could say.”

  “I hate talk about soldiers dying well or not dying well,” she had said in a low voice. “They’re gone — we should just remember that.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Please don’t be. I shouldn’t have said that. Not to you. And I am glad you talked to Dad. He needs heroes. Mother was his first and greatest, and now he has Dave.”

  “And how about you?”

  She had smiled, but it hadn’t erased the crease of worry in her forehead. “I’m not heroic, not the least bit.”

  He said awkwardly, “Can I help with him?”

  “No, I’ll manage all right. This doesn’t happen every night. But when he learned that David had been killed he just couldn’t...” She sighed faintly. “I suppose if you were charitable enough you could call Dad a war casualty, too.”

  He had been very moved by her then. “The hell you’re not heroic,” he said. “The hell you’re not.”

  When he left the next morning Farrell’s impression of Barbara had been neither sentimental nor romantic; what had remained with him was the simple fact that she had been putting her handsome, well-mannered father to bed for years without resentment or shame, knowing it was a problem she could never solve but facing it nonetheless with dignity and compassion.

  Farrell sat up and glanced again at the bedside clock. It was ten of seven, which was almost his deadline. He smiled as he began unbuttoning his shirt. Put her father to bed for years. Hardly a dainty recollection to carry away from the first meeting with his future wife. But most people, he felt, were in the habit of summing up one another in a sentence or two, and usually these capsule estimates lacked any hint of grace or dignity. Do you know so-and-so? You mean the guy whose wife ran off with the bridge teacher? That’s the one. So much for so-and-so, his dreams and yearnings, his conviction that he was made of significant clay, destined for eternal existence.

  Farrell did not find it a gloomy idea. In fact, it struck him as rather funny, and he was thinking of how it might be incorporated into a parlor game when the door opened and Barbara came in. She said, “John!” helplessly and irritably. “What is the matter with you? Are you trying to be late? You know what a big thing this dinner is for Sam and Grace.”

  “I’ll hurry. I was just thinking up a parlor game. Do you want to be a guinea pig?”

  “Tell me later. I’m going to shower.” She put out a black dinner dress, pumps and hose, and then collected her robe and lingerie.

  “How’s Mrs. Simpson?” Farrell asked, as Barbara unzipped her skirt. “In a good mood?”

  “She’s usually all right. She simply likes a little advance notice. It upsets her when people call at the last minute and sulk because she’s not available. Start getting ready, please.”

  Barbara came out of the bathroom a few minutes later in panties and bra, her skin pink from the shower. She rubbed the steam from the mirrored panel of the door and began putting on lipstick. As she inspected her eyes and mouth with impersonal care, Farrell glanced at the reflection of her body in the mirror. She was no longer the spindly-legged girl he had met that long-ago afternoon at the railroad station in Westchester. The spare childish look was gone; her body had filled out to a functional maturity.

  Farrell went in to shower and shave. When he came out she was wearing a black dress with a skirt that flared out over a pink petticoat. The straps of the dress were vivid against her bare shoulders, and her jewelry, a double strand of pearls and matching earrings glowed against her warm coloring.

  As he twisted studs into his dress shirt Farrell said, “Look, I forgot about my game. Now bear with me a second. Do you remember Joan Mellon?”

  “Yes, I think so. Isn’t she that friend of yours who broke her leg skiing the week before her wedding?”

  “That’s it exactly. Now how about Al Pearson?”

  “Oh, really, John. We are late. Is he the one who came home to find that his wife had sold the house and furniture and gone off with a brush salesman or something?”

  “Exactly,” Farrell said. “The lab work is over. Now the game goes like this: you see, everybody is in the habit of summing everybody else up in a sentence or two. I ask you about Joan Mellon, and you say, oh sure, she broke her leg the week before she got married. And the same with poor old Al Pearson. Wife ran off with a brush salesman and so forth. The thing is this: we’ll ask everyone to write a single sentence describing someone else at a given party. Or maybe we’ll have two teams. Details we can handle later. Anyway we put the slips of paper in a hat, distribute them hit-or-miss, and then the job is to relate the one-sentence description to the person to whom it applies. Got it? I see some obvious bugs, but we can iron those out in the heat of combat. For an example now, how would you describe Chicky Detweiller in one sentence?”

  “I think you’d better skip the whole idea,” Barbara said. “I don’t like it.”

  “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “It’s a stupid thing to involve people in,” she said. “It simply gives them a green light to be hurtful and cruel, to damn one another with a few flip comments. Can’t you see that?”

  “You’re taking this pretty big, aren’t you? It’s just a gag, you know.” Turning her by the elbows, he said, “Hold still now. Relax.” He massaged the back of her neck slowly with his fingers. “You’re all tied up in knots. What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t mean to fly off the handle,” she said. “I thought I’d wait until after the party to tell you. I didn’t want to spoil the evening.”

  “Never mind that. Let’s have it.”

  She turned around and sighed despairingly. “Jimmy’s been stealing money from the house for the past coupl
e of weeks. I couldn’t believe it at first and that’s why I didn’t say anything to you about it. It seemed so preposterous. I’m careless with change sometimes and I thought perhaps I’d mislaid the money. But I’m afraid that was just wishful thinking.”

  “Now just a minute, honey.” Farrell sat on the bed and pulled her gently down beside him. He patted her hands and said, “Maybe it isn’t so wishful after all. We’re both pretty careless with money, for that matter.” Farrell took a deep breath; he seemed to need more air, cleaner air. Jimmy wasn’t a thief; there was no chance of that. “Now listen, honey,” he said. “How about baby sitters and the woman who comes in to do the ironing? And Angey’s friends, for that matter? They fly in and out of here like birds. How did you happen to pin this on Jimmy?”

  She glanced at him quickly. “Do you think I’m trying to pin it on him, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Now, now,” he said, still patting her hand. “You know that wasn’t what I meant. But I want to know why you’re sure it was Jimmy.”

  “You haven’t given me a chance.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “Well, a half-dozen times in the past two weeks I’ve missed odd bits of change. Sometimes it would be a dollar or two, other times a quarter or a few dimes or nickels.” She drew a deep breath. “For instance, I’d pay the milkman and leave the change in the kitchen. It would vanish. Or I’d be sure I had a dollar or two change in the pocket of my car coat, but when I stopped to buy cigarettes or something the money would be gone. Then two days ago I bought a magazine subscription from the Sims’ oldest boy. I put two dollars and eighty cents change on the table in the hallway and just then the phone rang. It was Chicky and she chattered on as usual. While I was talking to her Jimmy came down the stairs and went out the front door.” She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. “When I went into the hallway the money was gone.”

  “You didn’t actually see him take it, did you?”

  “No, but he was the only person who went through the hallway while I was on the phone.”