Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings Read online

  “The fact is perfectly plain,” Mrs. Harmon said severely to her daughter. “Your own mother’s sewing, weeks and weeks of work, isn’t good enough for you to wear out in public. So you can go without.”

  “Without clothes?” said Mildred sullenly.

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. You picked out the style of this dress yourself and I spent three weeks making it and it looks just beautiful on you and—”

  “I didn’t pick out the style,” Mildred said.

  Her mother sighed. “I sometimes think you are the most unreasonable—”

  “I wanted the dress in the store,” Mildred wailed. “Not for you to copy it.”

  Her mother took a deep breath, as if determined to be reasonable in spite of everything. “Dresses in the store cost a lot of money,” she said. “This dress cost less than—”

  “If I only had some money,” Mildred said hopelessly. “I’ll write to this guy in the paper says he’s giving money away. I’ll get married or something.” She tossed her head defiantly. “Then I can have dresses.”

  Mrs. Harmon shifted her ground abruptly and began to weep. “Three weeks I took to make that dress,” she said mournfully, “and now it’s not good enough for you, and you want to run away and get married, and all these years I’ve tried to keep you looking nice and worked to buy pretty things and spent three weeks—”

  “Oh, Mother,” said Mildred. She blinked to keep tears out of her own eyes. “I’m not going to get married, honestly. And the dress is beautiful. I’ll wear it, honestly I will, I’ll wear it all the time.”

  “It’s no good,” her mother said. “I know all the other girls—”

  “It’s beautiful,” Mildred said. “It’s just like the one in the store. It’s the prettiest dress I ever saw, and I’m going to put it on right now.”

  Mrs. Harmon lifted her face briefly from her handkerchief. “Watch out for that pin I left in the shoulder,” she said.

  —

  “For the last time, I’m afraid I find it necessary to say,” Amy Nelson said emphatically, “that I do not wish to go to any movie.”

  “But—”

  “Indeed I do not,” Amy said. She set her shoulders and looked extraordinarily stern. “Movies last night,” she said. “Movies the night before. I’m so tired of going to movies I don’t know what to do. And anyway there’s nothing left to see.”

  “But, Amy—”

  “Some girls,” said Amy pointedly, “like to go to the theater. Some girls like to go to a nightclub and dance. Some girls even like to ride in taxis and wear gardenias. Of course I’m always happy at the movies, though. Good old Amy.”

  “I can’t afford—”

  “That point,” said Amy delicately, “is the one I was too polite to refer to. Let me just remark, however, that I know of only one grown man who has not got enough initiative to get out and do something for himself. He works heart and soul for this organization and comes around every week and says thank you to them so gratefully for— What is it they pay you? Seventeen cents a week?”

  “Now listen—”

  “Some men are making good money at twenty-four. Some men have good jobs and they’re not afraid to assert themselves and keep up with other people and not let everyone else get ahead of them, and their girls don’t have to go to movies every night of the week and see the same old—”

  “But when I’ve worked there a little—”

  “And some men,” Amy continued icily, “do not expect girls to wait around until they are sixty-five and drawing old-age pensions before they can get married.”

  “Well, to hear you talk—”

  “Here,” said Amy in her sweetest voice, “perhaps this will help you. Here, in the classified section of tonight’s paper. Perhaps this is the lucky break you’ve been waiting for. Let me just give you this copy of tonight’s paper, since I am sure it would take your entire weekly earnings to buy one for yourself.”

  “You don’t have to talk like—”

  “And now, good night,” said Amy, less than graciously.

  —

  “He shouldn’t of done it, that’s all,” said Ronald Hart, who was fifteen years old and felt utterly responsible for his mother and ten-year-old brother. “He’s going to get us all in trouble, that’s what.”

  “Dickie,” said his mother, “tell me again what happened.”

  “I wrote the man like I said,” Dickie told her. He looked nervously from his mother to his brother. “I didn’t think he’d answer,” he said, his voice trembling. “I never thought he’d answer.”

  “I’m afraid we ought to send it back to him,” his mother said. She had tight hold of the shining bill, and she twisted it between her fingers as though afraid to let it go.

  “Well, we haven’t really done anything,” Ronald said. “Maybe we ought to tell the cops.”

  “No, no,” said his mother hastily. “That’s the most important thing of all. We’re not going to tell anybody, you hear? Ronald?”

  “Okay,” said Ronald, “but maybe he’s a gangster or—”

  “Dickie, you hear me?”

  “Yes, but suppose they catch us?” Dickie said.

  “We haven’t done anything,” his mother said again. “I don’t even know if it’s any good. I don’t dare take a hundred-dollar bill into the bank and ask them if it’s any good.”

  “Counterfeit,” said Ronald wisely.

  “But what if it isn’t?” said his mother. “Suppose it’s real?” She sighed, and looked down at the hundred-dollar bill. “They have our address, of course.”

  “I had to put the address in for him to know where to send the money,” Dickie said miserably.

  His mother reached a sudden decision. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll put it right in Dickie’s piggy bank. Then if they come and ask us about it, we can say we just put it away for safekeeping. And if no one comes after a while, why, I guess it’s ours. But don’t tell anyone.”

  “Don’t you tell, Dickie,” his brother said warningly.

  “Don’t you tell,” Dickie said.

  “You’re the one always blabs out everything.”

  “I was the one thought of writing him in the first place, wasn’t I?”

  “And look what you got us into.”

  “Boys,” said their mother warningly, “we’ve got enough trouble without you quarrelling. Now, Dickie, there’s one more thing I want you to do.”

  “What?”

  “Just in case it is all right,” his mother said, “I want you to sit right down and write that man a nice letter saying thank you.”

  “Oh, Mother!”

  “No one is ever going to say my boys weren’t brought up right,” she said firmly.

  —

  Mr. John Anderson let himself into his apartment, carrying his mail, and sighed deeply as he closed the door behind him. He was hungry and tired, and his day had gone poorly. He had succeeded in persuading a newsboy to accept ten dollars, and he had slipped a hundred-dollar bill into the cup of a blind beggar, but otherwise he had had no success at all. He winced when he remembered the way the truck driver had spoken to him, and the thought of the giggling shopgirls made him almost ill.

  He took off his coat and sat down wearily in the easy chair. In a few minutes he would take care of the mail, then have a shower and dress and go out to some nice restaurant for dinner; he would take a vacation for this evening and carry only enough to take care of his own expenses. He could not decide whether to take a taxi uptown to a fancy steakhouse, or to go to the seafood restaurant nearby and have a lobster. Lobster, he rather thought.

  After he had rested briefly he got up, went to the desk, and picked up the mail he had brought home with him. Absently he stared at the stacks of ten-dollar bills in the pigeonholes of his desk: the fives, the fifties, the hundreds. The mail under his hand was typical—one offensively humorous request for a million dollars, badly written in capital letters, and unfortunately in
cluding no return address; one circular from a loan company featuring on the envelope a man pointing toward the reader and the statement “YOU need no longer worry about money.” There was a terse note from the newspaper saying that his week was up today, and asking if he desired to continue running his ad. One letter was signed by three hundred children in the Roosevelt Elementary School, saying thank you for the television set he had given the school library. One postcard read, “Dear Sir, If you really mean it please send ten dollars return mail.” This last he answered, addressing the envelope quickly and enclosing, without counting, a handful of ten-dollar bills.

  Then he sat down at the desk, looking with desperation and frustration at the stacks of money. Finally, in a fury, he took one of the piles of ten-dollar bills and threw it wildly against the opposite wall, where it scattered so that ten-dollar bills floated all about the room and settled gently down onto the furniture. “In the name of heaven,” he wailed, “what am I going to do with it all?”

  The Bridge Game

  Mrs. Murray went quickly into the living room carrying a dish of salted nuts in one hand and a dish of chocolates in the other, and hummed amiably to herself as she put them down carefully on diagonal corners of the bridge table, which stood already set up in the center of the room.

  “I got out a large ginger ale and a large club soda,” she said, her humming rising for a minute into words and then subsiding back to anonymity again.

  “Okay,” Mr. Murray said. He sat reading his newspaper, a large, cheerful, balding man like millions of others who sat peacefully of an evening in their own chairs, reading their own papers; like probably hundreds of other men whose wives had invited neighbors over for bridge, he still had his jacket and tie on. He would take them off when the Leghorns came, asking permission politely of the ladies, encouraging Mart Leghorn to do the same, but as long as he had to open the door to the Leghorns he must be correctly dressed.

  Like millions of other wives, Mrs. Murray looked like her husband. She was plump and pleasant, and dieting, and would try to go very easy on the candy and nuts while she played bridge, she and Mrs. Leghorn both begging prettily to have the dishes put as far away from them as possible, “So I won’t forget and just go on eating them; I just can’t stop once I start!” Later in the evening she would serve coffee and a chocolate cake she had made herself, with a careful eye on the sugar.

  The doorbell rang as she was standing vaguely looking around the room, rechecking everything. Mr. Murray rose heavily and put his paper down on the arm of the chair, and Mrs. Murray moved it to the bottom shelf of the end table and followed him out into the hall.

  “Evening, evening,” Mr. Murray was saying heartily. “Come in, come in, Roberta. Mart, old boy.”

  “Don’t you look nice,” Mrs. Murray said, and Mrs. Leghorn said, “How nice you look tonight,” and “Dora, dear, we brought our daughter, Carol, I hope you don’t mind, she was all alone at home and I told her I was sure you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Murray said, making her voice sound pleased. “We’re delighted, of course.”

  “She can just sit and read or something,” Mrs. Leghorn said. “You really don’t mind?”

  “I hope you don’t mind my barging in like this, Mrs. Murray,” Carol said; she went over and put her arm around Mrs. Leghorn. “Mother said she was sure you wouldn’t mind, and I said I’d just sit and read or something.”

  “We’re delighted,” Mrs. Murray said. “I hope we won’t bore you.”

  Carol laughed. She was very tall and thin and very tan, and she wore her hair—it was black, as Mrs. Leghorn’s used to be—over her forehead in bangs, and down her back in a smooth straight line. She put her hand out and squeezed Mrs. Murray’s. “I did want to stop and say hello while I was in town,” she added.

  Breaking away from Carol, Mrs. Murray succeeded in leading everyone into the living room, where she and Mrs. Leghorn sat on the couch and Carol sat properly on a stiff chair slightly removed from the rest of the room, while the men walked around each other absently, like dogs settling down to sleep.

  “How is college, Carol?” Mrs. Murray asked.

  “Oh, grand,” Carol said. She smiled brightly. “It’s good to get home for a while, though.”

  “How long will you be here?” Mrs. Murray asked, nodding.

  “Till Wednesday.” Carol had started to answer almost before Mrs. Murray finished asking; it was a polite formality, like “How are you,” that had to be gotten past before Mrs. Murray and Carol could size each other up afresh. Carol had been away for three months now, and this was her first trip home. Mrs. Murray noticed her thin leather sandals, her long bare legs. “You certainly have changed,” she said, and Carol laughed easily.

  “Bet it feels good to be home,” Mrs. Murray said.

  “Well?” Mr. Murray demanded abruptly, coming to stand in front of Carol. “Well, how does it feel to be back home?”

  Carol looked up at him. “Gets pretty dull in the old hometown,” she said.

  “Well,” Mr. Murray said, “ought to have some young men around to liven it up. Girl like you needs young fellers.”

  Mrs. Murray tightened her lips. She disliked her husband’s use of vernacular just as she disliked his telling stories in dialect; she felt it sat awkwardly on a man of his age and dignity, and besides, he was apt, so often, to misuse a mechanical vocabulary. “I thought we might play bridge,” she said to Mrs. Leghorn, gesturing at the card table. She allowed just the faintest hint of disappointment, plans upset, to creep into her voice. “But I’m afraid Carol…”

  Carol turned away from Mr. Murray immediately. “Oh, please,” she said. “I’ll be just fine, honestly.”

  “Well,” Mr. Murray said, looking at the card table as though he had never seen it before, “I don’t know why we can’t all play. Carol can take my place to start with, and then we can cut in.”

  “I don’t think we ought to…” Mrs. Murray began.

  “Oh, no, really,” Carol said. “I can just sit and read, that’s what I came for. I just didn’t want to sit home all alone,” she added to Mr. Murray.

  “Mart,” Mrs. Leghorn called, “tell them that Carol doesn’t want to play bridge.”

  Mr. Leghorn turned around guiltily. “She can take my place,” he said.

  “Suppose we just give up bridge,” Mrs. Murray said. This time her voice held an audible grievance. “We can sit and talk.”

  “Suppose I make everybody a drink,” Mr. Murray said. He slapped Mr. Leghorn on the shoulder. “Drink, old man?”

  “I’ll help,” Carol said, jumping up. “After making so much trouble I ought to do something useful.”

  “Never mind,” Mrs. Murray called, but Carol had followed the men out to the kitchen.

  “You know,” Mrs. Leghorn began at once, “I could just kick myself for bringing Carol tonight, but the poor child gets so lonesome, and it seems like all her friends are out of town—the Raglan boy’s in Maine, you know—and I can’t just send her off alone to the movies or something.”

  “What’s she been doing all the time she’s been home?” Mrs. Murray asked flatly.

  “Well,” Mrs. Leghorn said, waving delicately, “she’s been busy, of course. Out a lot, and shopping and all that. There are plenty of people who’d like to take Carol around, of course. But she won’t go out with just anybody.”

  Mrs. Murray felt her social injury being passed over lightly. “I’ll tell you what we can do,” she said. “I don’t care much for bridge anyway, you know. I like to play, but of course I’m not really terribly good.”

  “You’re much better than I am,” Mrs. Leghorn said. “If anybody’s going to…” She stopped and listened to a roar of laughter from the kitchen. “You know, Oliver seems such a hand with young folks,” she laughed. “I’ll never forget him at the country club dance last Christmas.”

  Mrs. Murray nodded grimly. “But I don’t mind sitting out at all,” she said.

  Carol came
into the room, laughing and carrying two drinks. “Natch,” she said over her shoulder to Mr. Murray, who was also carrying two drinks, and they both laughed.

  “Mother, Mrs. Murray,” Carol said. She handed them the drinks, then took hers from Mr. Murray. “Here’s to fun,” she said, and she and Mr. Murray laughed again.

  Mr. Leghorn followed them finally out of the kitchen, carrying his own drink, which he sipped as he walked. “I like that dining room wallpaper,” he said to Mr. Murray. “Who’d you get it from?”

  “Our landlord,” Mr. Murray said boisterously.

  “It was here when we moved in,” Mrs. Murray explained.

  “Daddy can’t think of anything but business,” Carol said.

  “I can’t think of anything but pleasure,” Mr. Murray said. Kittenishly, Mrs. Murray thought.

  “We’ve settled the bridge problem,” Mr. Murray said to his wife. He took a deep swallow of his drink. “You three are going to play, and Carol and I are going to play gin rummy.”

  “Oh, come on,” Carol said, making a horrible frown. “I said I wasn’t going to play anything, and you know it.”

  “Perhaps Carol would like to play in my place,” Mrs. Murray said loftily. “I don’t really feel like playing at all.”

  “Let’s not have all that again,” Mr. Murray said firmly. “It’s all settled.”

  “You read this thing, Oliver?” Mr. Leghorn asked from across the room. “This book?” He held up a book he had taken from the end table.

  “Never learned to read,” Mr. Murray said. “Can’t read a note.”

  Mr. Leghorn laid the book down and turned the pages absently. “I like music, now,” Mr. Murray said to Carol. “I get a real kick out of that.”

  “Charge,” Carol said. When he stared, she said, “Charge. You get a charge out of that.”

  “I get a charge out of that,” Mr. Murray said.

  Mr. Leghorn closed the book and came purposefully across the room. “Going to play bridge?” he asked. “Roberta, you play with Oliver. Dora and I will take you on.”

  “And Carol?” Mrs. Murray asked, before her husband could say it.

  “She can sit and read or something,” Mr. Leghorn said. “Good book over there on the table, Carol.”