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

He caught at her arm to steady her and said, “Sorry, Miss—” and then paused to stare at her. She was accustomed to such a reaction by this time and knew that he would now make a pass. She had two reactions of her own for these occasions. She would adopt an air of cold contempt, or she would smile. ‘

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” he said.

She had meant to use contempt. He was small and she liked taller boys. But he was older than the boys of her own crowd and very well dressed. Clothes-conscious herself, she liked that.�She said, “All right.”

It developed that his name was Eddie Mason and that he was at the track, an expression that puzzled her briefly until she realized that he meant the race track which operated just outside Providence.

“I’ve got three mounts tomorrow,” he said. “How would you like to come out to the track and watch?”

Not for the world would she have admitted that she had to go to school. “Sure,” she said.

It further developed that he had a new car and that he liked to dance. Before they separated she agreed to meet him later in the evening on the corner of the street where she lived. They would go to the roadhouse where Tommy Dorsey was playing a one-night stand.

She had never been to a roadhouse; she knew that her father would refuse to let her go if she asked. At supper she said that she was going to the movies with Frances Adiano, a rather plain girl who worshiped her and whom she treated with a casual contempt.

It was not only the day of the big name bands, it was a day of big songs. “I’ll Never Smile Again,” and “String of Pearls.” Louise Palaggi was fascinated by the music and the surroundings. She had discovered a new world that she never proposed to leave.

Later, in Eddie Mason’s car, she learned the price of living in such a world. She paid it, if not cheerfully, at least without more than token protest.

Her father would be waiting up, so Eddie left her a block from the house. While she walked that block she rehearsed the attitude she would use when she walked in. She was completely aware of the strength of her position in the Palaggi home; she had developed a naivete to center the attentions of her father and her four brothers on herself and away from any infractions of the few family rules that applied to her. But it was almost two o’clock in the morning, and she knew she would have to use a different tactic.

Attilio and her brother Dominick were waiting for her in the kitchen. The old man had drawn his trousers on over the heavy winter underwear that he wore to bed. His white hair was rumpled and his eyes were reddened with weariness and worry. Dominick, Louise’s oldest brother, sat at the table, his arms folded across his chest. His eyes were hot and sullen. She was more frightened of him than of her father although, queerly, she sensed that he loved her more than her other brothers.

He stood up and pushed his father back when the old man would have risen. “Where have you been all night?” he demanded. “And don’t lie about being at the Adianos’. We talked with Frances.”

She was thankful that she had not tried the old approach, the innocent smile. Dominick, she thought, would have slapped her if she had.

Her one defense was attack. “You’re not my father,” she said. “If pa wants to know where I was, he’ll ask me.

Attilio looked up at her. “I ask,” he said tiredly. “Where you been, Louise, till such a time?”

She said contritely, “I’m sorry I’m so late, Pa. Some of the other kids got up a crowd to go dancing. I didn’t think we’d be so late.”

Dominick was watching her closely, looking at her clothes. He asked more quietly, “You all right, Louise? Nothing happened?”

She said angrily, “You see, Pa? He acts as if I was a whore or something just because I stayed out a little with the kids. He’s got no right!”

She had, as she had planned, made the issue not her lateness but Dominick’s criticism of it. Attilio turned to stare at Dominick.

“Such words I hope never to hear my daughter use,” he said, “But she is right. Dominick, never say again to me that Louise is a bad girl.”

Dominick and his brothers still treated the head of the family with Old Country deference. Dominick, who had said nothing of the sort, stood up angrily. “All right, Pa,” he said bitterly. “If it was my say I’d give her a licking.”

The old man said, “Is not your say. I am the head of this house.”

Later, in her bedroom, Louise felt a little sorry for Dominick. He would be mad for a couple of days. Then he would bring her a present and make up. She thought, before she went to sleep, of the fun she would have at the race track with Eddie Mason. Thinking of Mason, she felt the last small twinge of conscience about what they had done in the back seat of his automobile. She could have stopped him if she really had wanted to. She hadn’t wanted to and now that it was over it didn’t seem such a terrible and mysterious thing. Forgetting the pain.

Eddie picked her up at noon, by prearrangement.

She had started from the house as if to go to school and spent the morning in the library. He had another man with him, a stocky man in his thirties with a loud voice and shrewd, piggish eyes.

“This is my agent,” Mason said. “Herb Clark.”

Herb would stay with her, it developed, during the races. When Mason had seated her in a box seat he gave her two fifty-dollar bills. “Have a ball, kid,” he said. “But don’t bet on any of the pigs I’m riding.”

Herb said, when Mason was gone, “You better let me bet that money for you if you decide you like something, kid. The mutuel clerk might ask you how old you are. How old are you, anyway?”

“Eighteen,” she said. She didn’t like Herb. He was too patronizing. “And I’ve bet for myself before.”

She hadn’t. She had never been to the track before, but she knew about betting from hearing her brothers talking about it. In the first race she bet five dollars on a favorite. The horse ran second. She told Herb that she had bet ten and shrewdly put five in her purse. In the second race she bet a horse that he picked, betting ten dollars this time. The horse won, paying her more than a hundred dollars, and she changed her mind about Herb. When he offered to buy her a drink, she accepted. They drank cold beer at the mezzanine bar where the crowd was thick and the bartender had little chance to pay attention to her apparent age.

When Eddie joined them after the sixth race—he had no more mounts for the day—she was more than two hundred dollars ahead and was becoming shrilly drunk.

Herb, winking at Eddie, said, “We ought to get on out of here before the last race.”

The ride toward Providence with the windows of the car open sobered her to the point where she realized the danger in facing her family—particularly the suspicious Dominick—with the smell of beer on her. They would, all of them, be working until dark on one of her father’s construction jobs. She got into the house before they returned and went to her room, closing and locking the door. When, one by one, they came to knock softly on the door and inquire was she all right, she reassured them that she just didn’t feel very well and that she would be up after a while. Turning away, they nodded wisely to each other. Louise, they told each other, was growing up. Probably this was her time of the month.

She saw Eddie Mason almost daily after that but she never again made the mistake of coming in after midnight, which had been established as her curfew. On the third date he asked her if she had a friend that she could get for Herb Clark so that they could double date. Louise had never completely outworn her original dislike for Clark and she was still a little frightened by him. Her first impulse was to say no, she didn’t know any girl who would go out with the agent. She rejected the impulse lest Eddie think it odd that she knew no girls. “Sure,” she said. “For tomorrow night.”

Eddie nodded. “Just don’t bring no rube,” he said. “Herb—well, you know him.”

In the morning she went to the Adiano house. Frances was in the kitchen, washing dishes. She was almost seventeen, a coarse-haired, dark-skinned girl. She did have a good figure. She was too happy to see Louise to be surprised at the visit. Usually she had to seek Louise out.

Louise had made up a careful little lie about Clark and Mason. “You’ll like them,” she explained. “They’re not like the boys around here.”

Frances was doubtful. Her family was deeply religious; she doubted that they would let her go out with strangers.

Louise ridiculed her. “You don’t have to tell them,” she mocked.

In the face of her ridicule, Frances agreed to meet her later in the evening. They would go, it had been agreed, to a drive-in movie.

Herb and Eddie picked Louise up first. Herb was curious about Frances, wanting to know not what she looked like but, “If she knew the score.”

If she admitted that Frances was a quiet, religious girl with practically no experience with men, Herb would be furious. Eddie would also resent Louise’s selection of Frances. In full knowledge of what Herb meant by asking if Frances knew the score, Louise said, “Sure she does, even if she don’t act like it.”

She watched Herb closely when they met Frances. He did not seem to be disappointed at her lack of prettiness. When they were parked in the far reaches of the drive-in—there were no individual loudspeakers then, only one great one that drowned out all conversation—she could feel the vibration of a struggle in the back seat over and above the disturbance she and Eddie were making. She heard too the muffled protests and the low cursing of Herb. After a time she heard a cry of pain and a wail from the back seat. Eddie sat up and said, “What the hell?”

Sobbing, Frances broke away from Herb and flung open the door to the back seat. Before she could get away Herb grabbed her and drew her back. “Get going!” he snapped to Eddie. When they were clear of the range of the loudspeaker Frances’ sobbing quieted some. She moaned to Louise, “He did it to me. He did it to me, Louise!”

The two men let them out a block away from Frances’ house. When they stopped the car, Herb looked curiously at Louise. “You bitch,” he said, and then they drove off.

Frances had by this time stopped her moaning. Louise, out of a new fear, said, “You better not tell, Frances. It would only make things worse.”

She had to argue the point for several minutes before she convinced Frances; even then she had little hope that the other girl would not run immediately to her parents.

She lived in fear for the next two days but there was no word from Frances’ parents. Going to market in the morning, she saw Frances herself, white-faced, but they did not speak. On the following afternoon, when