The Accused - Harold R. Daniels (best novels for students TXT) 📗

paint on it. On the following day she did two more boards and thereafter one at a time, sporadically. At the time Morlock went to trial for her murder, less than one wall was done.

For years, food had been to her something that you ate so that you would not be drinking on an empty stomach. But after they bought the stove and moved into the tenement, she made a real effort to plan and cook picture-book meals for Morlock. He came home one night to pot roast and mashed potatoes, broccoli and endive salad. The very next night he came home to cold pot roast and canned peas. The cooking phase lasted days less than the restoration phase.

There came a period when she became addicted to watching television, watching the day by day adventures of the heroines of the daytime serials. Other women, she knew, found them of absorbing interest. She convinced herself that she watched out of a sense of duty to Alvin. After just three weeks of marriage, she was having to fight hard to keep up any sort of pretense at being a happy housewife. One afternoon she walked toward the television set and stood staring down at the screen where a stereotyped heroine was weeping over her lover lost. Louise said out loud, “Bull—,” and reached down and cut the set off. She was pleased with the word. She had carefully avoided swearing and vulgarisms except of the mildest kind since her marriage. She said it again. Then she took her coat from the bedroom closet and walked briskly from the tenement.

The bar and grill adjacent to their tenement was called Fagin’s and the words,_ Ladies Invited,_ were stenciled on the front window. Louise walked in without hesitation. It was dim and smelled pungently of beer. A kaleidoscope of a juke box sang softly to itself in a corner of the room. She felt a long-missing contentment as she walked toward the bar and sat on a high stool. There was a sign behind the bar that had the words_ Bartender on Duty_ in red enamel over a small piece of slate. On the slate was chalked,_ Jimmy._

“I’ll have a beer, Jimmy,” she said pleasantly.

When it came, she sipped it slowly while she looked around the long room. There were half a dozen men drinking quietly at the bar. Four men were clustered about a shuffleboard table opposite the bar, noisily arguing about the game. There was one woman in the room and Louise automatically measured her. She was plain and quite fat; her face was raddled and her eyes vacuous. Louise discarded her.

When her beer was half gone the bartender brought a fresh glass and nodded toward the shuffleboard table. “On Billy Harrison, Miss,” he said. She glanced swiftly along the bar. Jimmy, the bartender, had refilled all the glasses. Billy, whoever he was, had bought for the bar and was consequently not making a play for her. Nevertheless, she lifted the glass and turned and nodded in the direction of the shuffleboard players.

There had been a slight lessening of talk, of laughter, and a withdrawal when she walked in at the door and moved toward a stool. She had expected it and she had sensed it. When she had called the bartender by name, there had been a relaxation. Not complete but a relaxation when it became apparent that she was wife to no man in this place and was not here as a troublemaker. When she turned to salute the drink buyer, the noisy talk and laughter in the room returned to its former level. With the gesture she identified herself to these people as a fellow traveler if not a friend. A middle-aged man with a soft hat on at the far end of the bar took out a scratch sheet and began to study it. Now she was home. These were people she understood, friendly people who never read books and who cursed when they felt like it and used dirty words.

A young man took the stool beside her. He wore tight jeans and a gray sweatshirt. His hair was dark and curly and his eyes brown and beautifully clear. He smiled and nodded his head in the direction of the shuffleboard. “You play?” he asked.

“A little,” she said, returning the smile and wishing that she had dressed more carefully.

“Want to challenge?” he asked.

“All right,” she agreed. She was familiar with the Unwritten law that bar society had developed to keep traffic moving at the shuffleboard table. The winners of any game must accept any challenges or forfeit the table. The bar had a law of its own—not unwritten. The losing team must buy a round for the winners.

“My name’s Eddie,” he said. She remembered with a sharpness that other Eddie who had been a jockey.

“Call me Louise,” she said happily.

“Okay, Louise. Try hard now. I’m on the tab already. You play on Billy Harrison’s end. He’s half stiff.”

She felt vastly protective toward this handsome young man. She would save the game for them both. “Don’t worry,” she said confidently.

They played and won the first game, with Eddie shouting down encouragement from his end of the table. “Nice shot, Louise.” And, “Way to go, Louise.” She barely remembered in time not to show too much skill, not to beat Billy Harrison too badly. By the end of the game she was indelibly Louise to the other players and to all the patrons of the bar.

They were challenged and won again. Eddie was now openly boasting of her, introducing her to every newcomer as his partner as proudly as if she were his wife. More proudly. They won beer and they bought beer and Louise glowed, happier than she had been since that afternoon when she heard the two young punks refer to her as having once been something to see. Well, she was something to see right now, wasn’t she?

She planned shrewdly a means to protect these golden hours. If she were home at five there would be time to get Al’s meal ready and straighten up the house a little. Then tomorrow afternoon—every afternoon—she could come to this place. As long as she left in time to get his supper ready. That left the mornings and the evenings. She could sleep late in the mornings. But she began already to begrudge Morlock the evenings, especially now at four o’clock on the afternoon of the day that she discovered Fagin’s.

When they lost a game—“My fault, Louise,” Eddie grimly admitted—they went back to the bar, taking stools beside the man with the scratch sheet. Louise had noted the men who came in and bought one or two drinks and talked briefly with this man, and she had placed him in his proper category. A bookmaker. She did not feel clever about her discovery. There would be one in a place such as this as a matter of course, and she accepted him as being the bookie as matter of factly as she accepted the bartender as being a bartender or the ladies’ room as being a ladies’ room.

More out of a desire to impress Eddie with her sophistication—she thought of it as knowing the score—than any urge to gamble, Louise asked the bookmaker, “Are they still broadcasting the fifth race at the Fairgrounds?”

He studied her briefly and then nodded. “If you want something, you’ll have to put it in right away.”

“Let me take your Armstrong,” she asked. When he handed it to her, she glanced quickly at the entries with Eddie looking over her shoulder. She fumbled in her purse for money. “Five to win on War Command,” she said casually.

Eddie asked Jimmy to turn the radio on. He said anxiously to Louise, “I don’t know, partner. That favorite looks hard to beat.”

“He can’t carry that much weight,” she reassured him.

War Command broke fast out of the starting gate. He was in front by three lengths down the back stretch, by five turning for home and by seven lengths under the wire. Eddie, throughout the race, moaned and pleaded, “Stay out there. Come on, baby, stay out there!” Louise watched him with a tolerant, almost maternal smile.

The man in the soft hat gave Louise twenty-eight dollars. She handed ten of it to Eddie. “We’re partners,” she said when he made a token protest. Then she bought a round of drinks for the bar. She felt confident, sure of herself, but she watched the clock. At fifteen minutes before five she got up to go.

Her friends mourned. Couldn’t she stay for another one? How about one more game, Louise?

She walked toward the door, a woman of determination and dignity. Jimmy, the bartender, called anxiously, “We’ll see you again, Louise?”

At the door, she turned and smiled. “Sure,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

Except for the prospect of a long evening with Al, she was quite happy.

Louise hurried up the granite steps to their tenement. Mrs. Carofano, the landlady, was sweeping the front hall on the first floor. Louise smiled and started up the stairs. Mrs. Carofano called after her, “What’s the rush? Stop and have a cup of coffee with me.”

Louise smiled again and shook her head. “I have to get Al’s supper,” she said, feeling vaguely like a martyr.

In the kitchen she hastily set out a meal. She waited, in some apprehension, for Morlock to come in. She retained some of the Old World attitude toward marriage that was prevalent on Federal Hill. Women—wives—did not go out drinking in public cafes in the afternoon. She considered chewing gum or brushing her teeth to eliminate the odor of beer and decided against it. Let him find out. It would be interesting to see what he would do about it. She knew what her father or her brother, Dominick, would have done. What they would have done, Morlock didn’t do. He came in and kissed her absently, not noticing the odor if any remained. Louise did not feel relieved but resentful.

Morlock had a habit of reading while he ate. He had given it up in the first days of their marriage but had lately resumed it. She watched him as he ate. After supper he would read the paper or correct student examinations, seldom speaking. He would probably stay up until long after she, in boredom, had gone to bed.

Morlock had tried, at first, to make conversation as he had made it in the parlor of Louise’s home on Federal Hill, but it had been one-sided. Louise was inconceivably uninformed about the subjects in which Morlock was interested. When he tried, as he had planned earlier, to bring the arts to her, he found that she preferred to turn the television set on—with the volume turned up high enough to prevent conversation.

They had had their first serious quarrel several days before Louise’s excursion to Fagin’s Bar. She was, it had developed, an atrocious housekeeper. Morlock had gone to the bathroom to wash before eating. When he had wet the facecloth and brought it up to his forehead, he had been revolted by the sour odor of curdled soap. He had been angry enough to say, “For God’s sake, Lolly, the least you could do is rinse a few things out once in a while.”

She had promptly sailed into battle, almost happily it seemed to him, beating at him with words he would not have believed she knew. Out of his anger he had exploded with a list of her shortcomings. With every one that he mentioned she had responded with a torrent of vileness.

For two weeks after her first visit, Louise spent her afternoons in Fagin’s Bar. It developed that Anna Carofano was also a regular at the place and Louise complained to her many times. “He