The Moth (42 page)

All that time, in the Army, in the hospital, and driving around, I didn’t think about my life, but at the same time it was there. I don’t know if I was bitter about it, but I wasn’t any too sold on it either, because I felt it wasn’t all my fault. I had been a heel, but I hadn’t wanted to be a heel, and I thought if things had broken different, I might not have been. Somewhere along the line, though, in the late summer of 1945, when the weather was getting a little cooler and Dixie was a place to be, I began to feel differently. I don’t know what it was that woke me up, maybe seeing colored people in all the jobs that had once been held by whites, in the hotels, garages, and other places I’d be, even Cremo College, as they call it, where they make the cigars. Understand, if they could get away with it, I was all for it. It certainly showed they were as good mechanics as the next if they were allowed to be, and proved if they could get that kind of work they could do it. But it tipped me off it wasn’t the same world as the one I had left. Ever since I’d been a man, in the 1930’s, there’d been no work to do, and what had been human beings were let sink until they were worse than slaves, they were rats. And down under everything else, that was what had made me bitter, made me feel that being a heel was something I couldn’t help. But if even colored field hands in the Carolinas could get jobs grinding valves and fixing starter teeth, that made me wonder if things might not, from now on, be different.

Then I began to hear about the new cars, and planes with pressurized cabins, and trains with vestibules you couldn’t see, except on curves, and boats with Diesel-electric stuff that hadn’t even been dreamed of before. It was my kind of world, something that spoke to what Hannah had called my mechanic’s soul. Then I got a load of the frozen food, and for ten minutes I saw things, and couldn’t fight them back. I mean, I saw something that made sense, and would fit in with my life, and let me get it back on the track, so it meant something. It seemed to me, if you could freeze stuff this new way, and have it taste good and be fresh, you could deliver dinner for a whole family with no home cooking necessary, except boiling of vegetables, and no washing up afterwards. A picture of the whole thing popped in front of my mind: central kitchens, to be located in each city I went into, where stuff would be cooking all day long, but not for any rush-hour trade, as everything would go in to freeze as soon as it was done; classified storage rooms, where everything would pack in portion units; assemblers, to work like department-store shoppers, and put each meal together in its container, with the dishes required, according to the order on the customers’ lists; trucks, with freeze compartments in them, to deliver each container to the house where it was due; other trucks, to call later, maybe late at night, to collect the containers, with dirty dishes in them, where they’d been put out like milk bottles; dish-washing rooms, that would take all dishes as the collectors brought them back, and wash them up with machines that would fit the dishes and cut breakage to a minimum. I meant to make dishes of plastic, so they could stand some slamming around, and still not get smashed.

I went into it pretty thoroughly. I talked to manufacturing plumbers on the washer stuff, and plastic people about the dishes. I took trips all around, and learned how stuff is frozen in central plants, with the ice company furnishing refrigeration by the ton of product. I got it through my head what a terrific amount of food, like the muskrat carcasses they throw away in Louisiana, goes to waste in this country, stuff I figured I could use, and show a profit on. I began to think in terms of colored help, for the handy way they had, on mechanics, and the little trouble they’d give, on organization. I was out every day, and cruised from deep bayou country up to Tennessee, all around the TVA Valley, the greatest thing in the way of farm development I ever saw. It seemed funny to be zipping around, in my little Ford car, through country I’d hoboed over, but I tried not to think of that. I knew, of course, that Mrs. America wasn’t going to do any standing broad jump into my lap for all the trouble I was taking over her, or do anything except act like the hundred-per-cent nitwit that in my opinion she was. From the beginning, I knew that this once more was a problem in public relations, or in other words that it involved people, instead of things. So, for one day I put in on freeze units, washing machinery, and fish, I put in two trying to figure the advertising, and wasn’t too proud to remember Denny, and thank him in my mind, for what he had taught me. I went into publications, art, type, and ideas. I worked out a bunch of ads, to run in three national magazines, that would eat up a hundred thousand dollars before we ever served a meal. They were all about two women, one a pretty, slick, sexy blonde, named Dora Dumb. The other was a gray-haired, quiet, refined wife, named Bessie Bright. Dora was to be the queen of all the department stores in her town, the markets, the shops, garages, beauty shops, and massage parlors. She broke appointments, charged things on the account, had five dollars put on the gasoline bill for cash because she’d forgotten to go to the bank, sent things back after she’d ordered them, and everybody was just as nice to her as they could possibly be. She had a husband named John Q. Dumb, that never had any money, that was always in hock to the furniture store, the finance company, and the loan sharks, and would try, with pencil and paper, to explain to her that all that nonsense of hers was costing them two prices on what anything ought to cost, that the interest on all that installment buying was charged just like the lamb chops were charged, that there was no need for them to be broke all the time, if she’d just pay cash, use her head, and keep things, once she bought them.

Bessie Bright had a husband named Louis, who always had money, never was in hock, lived twice as well as the Dumbs, and all because she paid cash, kept things, gave the stores no trouble, and got the breaks. I made it clear that Dora Dumb could not trade at Dillon, Inc. That was to be an exclusive place, reserved to Bessie Bright and her friends. And the point I was trying to put over was, that if you took the Dillon Variety Budget Dinner, you got a different meal every night in the month, but with no daily order to fool with, no mind-changing at the last minute, no Dora Dumb nonsense, we could put it on the table cheaper than Bessie could cook it, so cheap as a matter of fact, and with so little work, that Bessie needn’t keep a maid, and Louis, Jr. could have that car. I got pretty well along with it, at least in my mind. Then I went over to New Orleans and lined up my dough. I picked the biggest bank on Canal Street, went in, sat down with the cashier, and told him I wanted the name of a million dollars, “available for investment purposes.” That hit him funny, as I expected it would, and we took it easy a few minutes, he being respectful to the uniform, but plenty shy of the idea. After a few minutes he said: “Major Dillon, I’m sure the investment you have in mind is a sound one, at least to your satisfaction, and well, you know, O.K. But I can’t be sending you to anybody to—”

“Nobody’s asking you to.”

“That’s what you said.”

“I asked you for a name. I didn’t ask you for a reference, anything of the kind. Naturally I’ll leave you out of it.”

“Yes, but even so—”

“Tell you what we’ll do.” I took a quarter out of my pocket, laid it down on his blotter. “There’s a two-bit piece, with the eagle on one side and George Washington on the other. Now you get yourself called outside, to have a drink at that far water cooler. Before you go, you write a name on a slip of paper, this scratch pad here. When you come back it’s gone, and I am. If I don’t land the million dollars, you keep the two bits, and it’s a comical little story for you when you’ve had a couple of these Sazerac cocktails they make down here. But if you land him,
you pay me.
Of course, I may use your bank to handle my money—that depends on how the million dollars feels. But it could turn out that way. Just a long shot, but worth two bits, I’d say, as a gamble.”

He laughed again, wrote something on the scratch pad, went out. It was just one word, when I got on the street with it, a French name I’ll call Douvain. Twenty minutes later I’d found out who Douvain was, and that afternoon I was in his office. I didn’t talk much, or try to close a deal, or anything crazy, or big. I spoke my piece in five or six minutes, told my idea, said I hoped to interest him if he’d reserve time for me whenever convenient. I made it clear I wanted a great deal of money, “at least a million dollars—if you don’t think in figures that big, say so and I’ll blow.” When I had it said, I shut up and sat there, letting him look me over. I guess it helped, what I’d learned standing reveille in the Army, to hold it an hour if I had to, without twitching my nose or coughing or scratching my leg, but I didn’t make any vaudeville show out of it, giving an imitation of a statue of Lincoln, anything like that. I just let him study me, and looked out at the street, up on the wall at the signed pictures of four or five presidents, and at his bookcases. In about five minutes he picked up the telephone, told his operator to get his home. He spoke in French, to his wife, and it seemed to me, from the basic I’d studied in camp, he was talking about me, and about dinner. When he hung up he said: “Major, you take me by surprise. I hadn’t expected to go into the restaurant business—or the polar storage business—or the farm business—or the advertising business—I’m a little confused which business you have in mind for me. But I have a feeling—some peculiar feeling of confidence you communicate to me. So I have spoken with my wife, and we shall be very glad if you can come to our home tonight, for dinner. Yes? At seven thirty?”

He spoke with a slight Creole accent, and didn’t say seven thirty but “seven sirty.” I didn’t know it then, but I’d caught him on his weakness when I began talking food. I said yes, went on back to the Roosevelt and had myself pressed and shaved and shined and powdered till I didn’t know myself, and showed up at his mansion on St. Charles Avenue at seven thirty sharp, for one of those dinner-coat things, with cocktails and lobsters and wine. By ten o’clock, I knew I was in, even if it was all in the French language. A girl played, and I sang the only French song I knew—“
Bonjour, Suzon
,” a thing Miss Eleanor had taught me for an encore. I went out of there with my future set.

As I walked to my car, it was one of those autumn nights they have no place in the world but Louisiana, soft, balmy, and clear, so the air has something in it that sets you nuts. I inhaled it, and as I looked up, there in a magnolia tree was the moth.

All that night it kept sweeping over me, the memory of what Hannah had said, that what had tripped me wasn’t only the breaks I’d got. It was something else, the romantic in me, that had kicked the beans into the fire twice, once in Baltimore when I’d thrown up the hotel and everything else for a girl that hadn’t even taken the ribbons off her hair yet, and again in California for the memory of her. And I faced it out with myself then, once more, lying awake in the Roosevelt Hotel: What was I going to do, leave that ghost to haunt me, and maybe louse me once more, or what? It was no trouble to remember what she looked like. I had dreamed about her, every few months, from the night I had left her, and always she looked the same, sunburned and blue-eyed and light-haired, and always twelve years old. I began to ask myself if I should go back to Maryland, or wherever she was, and get it over with. Either I’d still be in love with her, and maybe we could begin where we left off, or I’d be cured with one look, and that would be that. I asked myself if it was all imagination, if I was just being a fool, if I should go to sleep and forget her. But that night in the car, more than twelve years before, driving to hell and gone all over the face of the map, wasn’t my imagination, and being thrown out of Seven-Star wasn’t, either. I slept, of course, after a while, and saw Douvain the next day, and checked over my finances with him, as to whether I was in any personal need, as he wouldn’t be able to take up anything in detail until after the first of the year, which was two or three months away. It pleased him I was well enough heeled, at least for a major in the Army, as I still had quite a lot of the California money, several thousand as a matter of fact. He asked me questions about that and I told him the truth, anyhow that I’d been kicked out on “a difference of opinion about matrimony.” He laughed, as a Frenchman would. I had him solid, but somewhere in my belly I was uneasy. I left New Orleans after lunch, and for the night holed up at the Cherokee in Tallahassee. I got going early, and made the De Soto, in Savannah, in time for late lunch.

W
HEN THEY CAME IN
, I don’t know, but I’d got to my coffee, and the place was almost empty, when the younger one, the blonde, went out, maybe to powder, and came back again, and I felt my heart skip a beat at the graceful way she walked. Both of them were in the uniform of Navy nurses, but on her it looked like something by Adrian in Beverly, while on the other one, who was around forty, it looked like the shine on a blue serge suit. I tried to keep my eyes off their table, and did, I guess, but could see them there, talking to each other, and laughing. I poured myself another cup of coffee, and wondered if I wanted it, or was making an excuse to sit there. I wondered if I shouldn’t have a third, and watch that walk some more, and try to forget the moth. Pretty soon the older one went out. Then the younger one, the one I’d been watching, came over. “... Major, don’t you think we should speak?”

I jumped up, shook hands, and pulled out a chair. “We
most
certainly should, Lieutenant. Can I entice you to join me? Perhaps for a liqueur?”

“Well—could we have apricot?”

“Waiter! ... Two apricot brandies. Be sure they’re Apri.”

“Apri. Did you learn that in France?”

“I was in France eight days.”

“Off agin, on agin, gone agin—”

“—Finnigan!”

We both laughed, and the waiter brought the drinks. When he had gone she said: “I bet you don’t even know it.”

“Know what?”

“Finnigan to Flannagan.”