22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories Read online

  Lois gave him away a few days later. After Gus consistently refused to be housebroken, Lois began to agree with her parents that is was cruel to keep a dog in the city.

  The night she gave away Gus, Lois told her parents it was dumb to wait till spring to go to Reno. It was better to get it over with. So early in January Lois flew West. She lived at a dude ranch just outside of Reno and made the acquaintance of Betty Walker, from Chicago, and Sylvia Haggerty, from Rochester. Betty Walker, whose insight was as penetrating as any rubber knife, told Lois a thing or two about men. Sylvia Haggerty was a quiet dumpy little brunette, and never said much, but she could drink more scotch-and-sodas than any other girl Lois had ever known. When their divorces all came through, Betty Walker gave a party at the Barclay in Reno. The boys from the ranch were invited, and Red, the good-looking one, made a big play for Lois, but in a nice way. "Keep away from me!" Lois suddenly screamed at Red. Everybody said Lois a rotten sport. They didn't know she was afraid of tall, good-looking men.

  She saw Bill again, of course. About two months after she'd returned from Reno, Bill sat down at her table in the Stork Club.

  "Hello, Lois."

  "Hello, Bill. I'd rather you didn't sit down."

  "I've been up at this psychoanalyst's place. He says I'll be alright."

  "I'm glad to hear that. Bill, I'm waiting for somebody. Please leave."

  "Will you have lunch with me sometime?" Bill asked.

  Bill got up. "Can I call you?" he asked.

  "No."

  Bill left, and Middie Weaver and Liz Watson sat down. Lois ordered a scotch-and-soda, drank it, and four more like it. When she left the Stork Club she was feeling pretty drunk. She walked and she walked and she walked. Finally she sat down on a bench in front of the zebra's cage at the zoo. She sat there till she was sober and her knees had stopped shaking. Then she went home.

  Home was a place with parents, news commentators on the radio, and starched maids who were always coming around to your left to deposit a small chilled glass of tomato juice in front of you.

  After dinner, when Lois returned from the telephone, Mrs. Taggett looked up from her book, and asked, "Who was it? Carl Curfman, dear?"

  "Yes," said Lois, sitting down. "What a dope."

  "He's not a dope," contradicted Mrs. Taggett.

  Carl Curfman was a thick-ankled, short young man who always wore white socks because colored socks irritated his feet. He was full of information. If you were going to drive to the game on Saturday, Carl would ask what route you were taking. If you said, "I don't know. I guess Route 26," Carl would suggest eagerly that you take Route 7 instead, and he'd take out a notebook and pencil and chart out the whole thing for you. You'd thank him profusely for his trouble, and he'd sort of nod quickly and remind you not for anything to turn off at Cleveland Turnpike despite the road signs. You always felt a little sorry for Carl when he put away his notebook and pencil.

  Several months after Lois was back from Reno, Carl asked her to marry him. He put it to her in the negative. They had just come from a charity ball at the Waldorf. The battery in Carl's sedan was dead, and he started to get all worked up about it, but Lois said, "Take it easy, Carl. Let's smoke a cigarette first." They sat in the car smoking cigarettes, and it was then that Carl put it to Lois in the negative.

  "You wouldn't wanna marry me, would you, Lois?"

  Lois had been watching him smoke. He didn't inhale.

  "Gee, Carl. You are sweet to ask me."

  "I'd do my damnedest to make you happy, Lois. I mean I'd do my damnedest."

  "You're very sweet to ask me, Carl," Lois said. "But I just don't wanna think about marriage for a while yet."

  "Sure," said Carl quickly.

  "Hey," said Lois, "there's a garage on Fiftieth and Third. I'll walk down with you."

  One day the following week Lois had lunch at the Stork with Middie Weaver. Middie Weaver served the conversation as nodder and cigarette-ash-tipper. Lois told Middie that at first she had thought Carl was a dope. Well, not exactly a dope, but, well, Middie knew what Lois meant. Middie nodded and tipped the ashes of her cigarette. But he wasn't a dope. He was just sensitive and shy. And terribly sweet. And terribly intelligent. Did Middie know that Carl really ran Curfman and Sons? Yes. He really did. And he was a marvelous dancer, too. And he really had nice hair. And he wasn't really fat. He was solid. And he was terribly sweet.

  Middie Weaver said, "Well, I always liked Carl. I think he's a grand person."

  Lois thought about Middie Weaver on the way home in the cab. Mid-die was swell. Middie really was a swell person. So intelligent. So few people were intelligent, really intelligent. Middie was perfect. Lois hoped Bob Walker would marry Middie. She was too good for him. The rat.

  Lois and Carl got married in the spring, and less than a month after they were married, Carl stopped wearing white socks. He also stopped wearing a winged collar with his dinner jacket. And he stopped giving people directions to get to Manasquan by avoiding the shore route. If people want to take the shore route, let them take it, Lois told Carl. She also told him not to lend any more money to Bud Masterson. And when Carl danced, would he please take longer steps. If Carl noticed, only short fat men minced around the floor. And if Carl put any more of that greasy stuff on his hair, Lois would go mad.

  They weren't married less than three months when Lois started going to the movies at eleven o'clock in the morning. She'd sit up in the loges and chain-smoke cigarettes. It was better than sitting in the damned apartment. It was better than going to see her mother. These days her mother had a four-word vocabulary consisting of, "You're too thin, dear." Going to the movies was also better than seeing the girls. As it was, Lois couldn't go anywhere without bumping into one of them. They were all such ninnies.

  So Lois started going to the movies at eleven o'clock in the morning. She'd sit through the show and then she'd go to the ladies room and comb her hair and put on fresh make-up. Then she'd look at herself in the mirror, and wonder, "Well. What the hell should I do now?"

  Sometimes Lois went to another movie. Sometimes she went shopping, but rarely these days did she see anything she wanted to buy. Sometimes she met Cookie Benson. When Lois came to think of it, Cookie was the only one of her friends who was intelligent, really intelligent. Cookie was swell. Swell sense of humor. Lois and Cookie could sit in the Stork Club for hours, telling dirty jokes and criticizing their friends.

  Cookie was perfect. Lois wondered why she had never liked Cookie before. A grand, intelligent person like Cookie.

  Carl complained frequently to Lois about his feet. One evening when they were sitting at home, Carl took off his shoes and black socks, and examined his bare feet carefully. He discovered Lois staring at him.

  "They itch," he said to Lois, laughing. "I just can't wear colored socks."

  "It's your imagination," Lois told him.

  "My father had the same thing," Carl said. "It's a form of eczema, the doctors say."

  Lois tried to make her voice sound casual. "The way you go into such a stew about it, you'd think you had leprosy."

  Carl laughed. "No," he said, still laughing, "I can hardly think it's leprosy." He picked up his cigarette from the ashtray.

  "Good Lord," said Lois, forcing a little laugh. "Why don't you inhale when you smoke? What possible pleasure can you get out of smoking if you don't inhale?"

  Carl laughed again, and examined the end of his cigarette, as though the end of his cigarette might have something to do with his not inhaling.

  "I don't know," he said, laughing. "I just never did inhale."

  When Lois discovered she was going to have a baby, she stopped going to the movies so much. She begun to meet her mother a great deal for lunch at Schrafft's, where they ate vegetable salads and talked about maternity clothes. Men in busses got up to give Lois their seats. Elevator operators spoke to her with quiet new respect in their nondescript voices. With curiosity, Lois began to peek under the hoods of baby carriages. />
  Carl always slept heavily, and never heard Lois cry in her sleep.

  When the baby was born it was generally spoken of as darling. It was a fat little boy with tiny ears and blond hair, and it slobbered sweetly for all those who liked babies to slobber sweetly. Lois loved it. Carl loved it. The in-laws loved it. It was, in short, a most successful production. And as the weeks went by, Lois found she couldn't kiss Thomas Taggett Curfman half enough. She couldn't pat his little bottom enough. She couldn't talk to him enough.

  "Yes. Somebody's gonna get a bath. Yes. Somebody I know is gonna get a nice clean bath. Bertha, is the water right?"

  "Yes. Somebody's gonna get a bath. Bertha, the water's too hot. I don't care, Bertha. It's too hot."

  Once Carl finally got home in time to see Tommy get his bath. Lois took her hand out of the scientific bathtub, and pointed wetly at Carl.

  "Tommy. Who's that? Who's that big man? Tommy, who's that?"

  "He doesn't know me," said Carl, but hopefully.

  "That's your Daddy. That's your Daddy, Tommy."

  "He doesn't know me from Adam," said Carl.

  "Tommy. Tommy, look where Mommy's pointing. Look at Daddy. Look at the big man. Look at Daddy."

  That fall Lois' father gave her a mink coat, and if you had lived near Seventy-Fourth and Fifth, many a Thursday you might have seen Lois in her mint coat, wheeling a big black carriage across the Avenue into the park.

  Then finally she made it. And when she did, everybody seemed to know about it. Butchers began to give Lois the best cuts of meat. Cab drivers began to tell her about their kids' whopping cough. Bertha, the maid, began to clean with a wet cloth instead of a duster. Poor Cookie Benson during her crying jags began to telephone Lois from the Stork Club. Women in general began to look more closely at Lois' face than at the clothes. Men in theater-boxes, looking down at the women in the audience, began to single out Lois, if for no other reason than that they liked the way she put on her glasses.

  It happened about six months after young Thomas Taggett Curfman tossed peculiarly in his sleep and a fuzzy woolen blanket snuffed out his little life.

  The man Lois didn't love was sitting in his chair one evening, staring at a pattern on the rug. Lois had just come in from the bedroom where she had stood for nearly a half-hour, looking out the window. She sat down in the chair opposite Carl. Never in his life had he looked more stupid and gross. But there was something Lois had to say to him. And suddenly it was said.

  "Put on your white socks. Go ahead," Lois said quietly. "Put them on, dear."

  6. Personal Notes On An Infantryman

  HE CAME into my Orderly Room wearing a gabardine suit. He was several years past the age-- is it about forty?--when American men make living-room announcements to their wives that they're going to gym twice a week--to which their wives reply: "That's nice, dear--will you please use the ashtray? That's what it's there for." His coat was open and you could see a fine set of carefully trained beer muscles. His shirt collar was wringing wet. He was out of breath.

  He came up to me with all his papers in his hand, and laid them down on my desk.

  "Will you look these over?" he said.

  I told him I wasn't the recruiting officer. He said, "Oh," and started to pick up his papers,but I took them from him and looked them over.

  "This isn't an Induction Station, you know," I said.

  "I know. I understand enlistments are taken here now, though."

  I nodded. "You realize that if you enlist at this post you'll probably take your basic training here. This is Infantry. We're a little out of fashion. We walk. How are your feet?"

  "They're all right."

  "You're out of breath," I said.

  "But my feet are all right. I can get my wind back. I've quit smoking."

  I turned the pages of his application papers. My first sergeant swung his chair around, the better to watch.

  "You're a technical foreman in a key war industry," I pointed out to this man, Lawlor. "Have you stopped to consider that a man your age might be of greatest service to his country if he just stuck to his job?"

  "I've found a bright young man with a A-1 mind and a F-4 to take over my job," Lawlor said.

  "I should think," I said, lighting a cigarette, "that the man taking your place would require years of training and experience."

  "I used to think so myself," Lawlor said.

  My first sergeant looked at me, raising one hoary eyebrow.

  "You're married and have two sons," I said to Lawlor. "How does your wife feel about your going to war?"

  "She's delighted. Didn't you know? All wives are anxious to see their husbands go to war," Lawlor said, smiling peculiarly. "Yes, I have two sons. One is in the Army, one is in the Navy--till he lost an arm at Pearl Harbor. Do you mind if I don't take up any more of your time? Sergeant, do you mind telling me where the recruiting officer is?"

  Sergeant Olmstead didn’t answer him. I flipped Lawlor's papers across the desk. He picked them up, and waited.

  "Down the company street," I said. "Turn left. First building on the right."

  "Thanks. Sorry to have bothered you," Lawlor said sarcastically. He left the Orderly Room, mopping the back of his neck with a handkerchief.

  I don't think he was out of the Orderly Room five minutes before the phone rang. It was his wife. I explained to her that I was not the recruiting officer and that there was nothing I could do. If he wanted to join the Army and was mentally, physically, and morally fit--then there wasn't anything the recruiting officer could do either, except swear him in. I said there was always the possibility that he wouldn't pass the physical exam.

  I talked to Mrs. Lawlor for quite a while, even though is wasn't a strictly G.I. phone call. She has the sweetest voice I know. She sounds as though she'd spent most of her life telling little boys where to find the cookies.

  I wanted to tell her not to phone me anymore. But I couldn't be unkind to that voice. I never could.

  I had to hang up finally. My first sergeant was ready with a short lecture on the importance of getting tough with dames.

  I kept an eye on Lawlor all through his basic training. There wasn't any one call-it-by-a- name phase of Army life that knocked him out or even down. He pulled K.P. for a solid week, too, and he was as good a sink admiral as the next one. Nor did he have trouble learning to march, or learning to make up his bunk properly, or learning to sweep out his barrack.

  He was a darned good soldier, and I wanted to see him get on the ball.

  After his basic, Lawlor was transferred to "F" Company of the First Battalion, commanded by George Eddy, a darn' good man. That was late last spring. Early in summer Eddy's outfit got orders to go across. At the last minute, Eddy dropped Lawlor's name from the shipping list.

  Lawlor came to see me about it. He was hurt and just a little bit insubordinate. Twice I had to cut him short.

  "Why tell me about it?" I said. "I'm not your C.O."

  "You probably had something to do with it. You didn't want me to join up in the first place."

  "I had nothing to do with it," I said. And I hadn't. I had never said a word to George Eddy, either pro or con.

  Then Lawlor said something to me that sent a terrific thrill up my back. He bent over slightly and leaned across my desk. "I want action," he said. "Can't you understand that? I want action."

  I had to avoid his eyes. I don't know quite why. He stood straight up again.

  He asked me if his wife had telephoned me again.

  I said she hadn't.

  "She probably phoned Captain Eddy," Lawlor said bitterly.

  "I don't think so," I said.

  Lawlor nodded vaguely. Then he saluted me, faced about, and left the Orderly Room. I watched him. He was beginning to wear his uniform. He had dropped about fifteen pounds and his shoulders were back and his stomach, what was left of it, was sucked in. He didn't look bad at all.

  Lawlor was transferred again, to Company "L" of the Second Battalion. He
made corporal in August, got his buck sergeant stripes early in October. Bud Ginnes was his C.O. and Bud said Lawlor was the best man in his company.

  Late in the winter, just about the time I was ordered to take over the basic training school, the Second Battalion was shipped across. I wasn't able to phone Mrs. Lawlor for several days after Lawlor was shipped. Not until his outfit had officially landed abroad. Then I long distanced her.

  She didn't cry. Her voice got very low, though, and I could hardly hear her. I wanted to say just the right thing to her I wanted to bring her wonderful voice up to normal. I thought of alluding to Lawlor as being one of our gallant boys now. But she knew he was labored and phony. I thought of a few other phrases, but they were all on the long-haired side, too.

  Then I knew that I couldn't bring her voice up to normal--at least not on such short order. But I could make her happy. I knew that I could make her happy.

  "I sent for Pete," I said. "And he was able to go to the boat. Dad started to salute us, but we kissed him good-by. He looked good. He really looked good, Ma."

  Pete's my brother. He was an ensign in the Navy.

  7. The Varioni Brothers

  Around Old Chi

  WITH GARDENIA PENNY

  While Mr. Penny is on his vacation, his column will be written by a number of distinguishing personalities from all walks of life. Today's guest columnist is Mr. Vincent Westmoreland, the well-known pro-ducer, raconteur, and wit. Mr. Westmoreland's opinions do not necess-arily reflect those of Mr. Penny or this newspaper.

  If, like Aladdin, I had means to be waited on by a sociable genie, I would first demand that he pop Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito into a fair-sized cage, and promptly deposit the menagerie on the front steps of the White House. I should then seriously consider dismissing my accommodating servant, after I had asked his one question - namely: "Where is Sonny Varioni?"