The Tight White Collar (19 page)

“Well, thank God that's over with,” Richard Strickland said to Jess Cameron the morning after the town meeting. “Now we can all go back to being what we were before. A nice, quiet community where nothing ever happens.”

“Richard,” said the doctor impatiently, “sometimes you are a complete fool.”

Richard Strickland was shocked. “What's the matter with you, Jess?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Jess and walked off toward his house.

But later, that afternoon, after the last patient had left his office, Jess sat quietly, his chair tilted back into a patch of sunlight. He was nervous and restless and he not only knew why but also knew what he was going to do about it. He was going to go down to New York where he would get quickly and thoroughly drunk and sleep with a different whore every night. Then he would sober up and come home and perhaps then he could put up with himself and Cooper Station for another six months.

Jess Cameron was one of the few people he knew who could say that he had had a completely happy, normal childhood.

“If Jess Cameron ever turns into a Freudian mess,” said Florence Strickland who prided herself on the fact that she kept abreast of things, “he'll never be able to blame it on his parents. Amy Cameron was a saint and although Gordon had his moments, he wasn't far behind her.”

When Jess was small, his mother used to sing in the kitchen and she had always had time to answer questions and play games and draw pictures. She played Chopin waltzes on the piano and she laughed a lot. Jess could never remember having seen her angry and he had never heard her raise her voice.

“Gordon, dear,” she would say to the husband who idolized her, “don't shout so. Tell me quietly. Tell me what happened.”

Gordon Cameron was a big, heavy man with a mustache and a large head covered with gray hair. Jess could not remember the time when his father's hair had not been gray. Gordon Cameron could be any kind of man, depending on the patient he happened to be treating at the time. He could be gruff, gay, pleasant, mean, smiling, sneering or sympathetic as the situation demanded.

“You could have been an actor, Dad,” said Jess. “How come you chose doctoring?”

Gordon looked sharply at his son.

He can really make his eyebrows beetle, thought the boy, delighted with this trick of his father's.

Gordon Cameron lit his pipe and sat down heavily, emitting his usual groan.

“God, it's enough to put a man in his grave, all this running around after babies and kids who swallow pins and men who get their arms caught in haying machines,” said Gordon. He looked silently at his son for a long moment, then he said, “I guess I'm a doctor because there didn't seem to be anything else I wanted to be. A man's got to do something, and by that I don't mean just anything. He has to do something with his life that brings him a feeling of peace and happiness not only while he is doing it, but also when it is done. There was a philosopher once, French fellow if I remember right, who said something about every man having to cultivate his own garden. Get what I'm driving at?”

“I think so,” said Jess, who did not really understand at all but who enjoyed the words his father used.

“The way I figure it,” said Gordon, “I was put here on Earth for a bigger purpose than just taking up space. One day, when I was just a bit older than you are now, it came to me that the best reason for anyone being here at all is to help out the fellow who's here along with him, and the way that seemed best to me was doctoring. So here I am, cultivating my garden in my own way, the way that suits me best. Dragging babies into the world and chasing after damned fools who get careless.”

Jess spoke with the impulse of the very young which is to please a beloved elder.

“I think I'll be a doctor, too,” he said, and was surprised when his own words filled him with decision and a kind of peace.

“You just wait awhile, boy, before you go deciding anything like that,” said his father. “You've plenty of time.”

But, excellent actor though he was, Gordon Cameron could not keep the look of happiness from flooding his eyes when his son spoke.

Jess finished his premedical courses at the state university. In August, of the same year, his mother died.

Amy Cameron had been spending the summer at the family cottage on one of the northern lakes and one day she had taken her husband's sailboat and had gone out on the water, alone. She was caught in one of the heavy storms that come so quickly and furiously to northern New England in August, but she managed to pull up to one of the small islands in the lake to wait out the storm. She reached home finally, safely and soaked to the skin. A few days later she confessed to Gordon over the telephone that she had managed to catch a rather heavy cold, but when he arrived at the lake the following weekend she had pneumonia and within three days she was dead.

In September, Jess left his suddenly old father in the very old Cameron house and went to Cambridge to enter the medical school at Harvard, and he wondered if it were really true, as he had heard Gordon tell so many patients, that time and work would eventually heal all pain.

Gordon Cameron was the first person Jess had ever seen who was the victim of a thorough, overwhelming loneliness, and he wondered what people who were younger, less strong and more frightened than his father did in defense against the dictatorship of loneliness.

Jess's first year at Harvard brought him in contact for the first time with people who came from places in the world other than Cooper Station and northern New England, and at first he yearned for home with a yearning that was almost a sickness. Then he took up pipe smoking and learned that the drink for a man to order was Scotch with plain water on the side and he went into Boston with a gang of his classmates and was introduced to the Old Howard. He began to think that at twenty-one years of age it was about time some of what he termed his hickish rough edges began to smooth themselves out and he would not admit even to himself that pipe tobacco burned his tongue nor that he preferred mixing drinks nor that the strippers at the Old Howard were a bore with their flabby bellies and their dirty net bras. Finally, he met a girl.

“Lorraine,” he repeated to himself when he was introduced to her. He rolled the name around on his tongue and liked the feel of it.

“Lorraine,” he said to her. “It's a lovely name.”

She was small, with masses of red hair and an upturned nose which Jess found fascinating. She had small pointed breasts and a tiny waist and her hips flared smoothly. She giggled. She
adored
things: Clark Gable, fried shrimp, musky perfumes, high-heeled shoes. She was a sales girl at Jordan-Marsh and she lived in a three-room apartment which she shared with two other girls on Beacon Street.

“Beacon Street,” said Lorraine. “Sounds elegant, doesn't it, Jess? You should see the place. A real dump.”

“I'd like very much to see it,” said Jess.

Lorraine giggled. “Not tonight,” she said. “Kit and Eloise are double dating with a couple of guys from B.U. and they're using the living room.”

In the weeks that followed Jess spent every moment he could spare away from classes with Lorraine. They went to the movies and ate at the Union Oyster House and walked in the Common. Jess took her to all the Harvard football games and his friends began to plague him with questions.

“Have you got to her yet, Jess?”

“Listen, Harkinson,” replied Jess angrily, “I think you have a mind like a sewer. She's not that kind of girl.”

“The hell she isn't,” said Harkinson. “A tart if I ever saw one.”

“You go to hell.”

“A pleasure, dear boy. A pleasure.” Harkinson lifted his drink. “Here's to hell. May the stay there be as pleasant as the way there. Seriously, Jess, have you
tried
getting to her?”

“Seriously and for the last time, Harkinson, shut your goddamned mouth. I'm in love with her.”

Harkinson nodded. “That's good,” he said. “A good, hot love affair will round out your first year at Harvard very nicely.”

“I'm going to ask her to marry me,” cried Jess who, until that moment, had never had any such intention.

Harkinson had been sitting in a tilted-back chair with his feet up on the table in front of him. The chair and Harkinson's feet hit the floor at the same moment.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, Jess! Listen here, old man, a little poontang is one thing, but marriage—”

Jess stamped out of the room and the last thing he would have admitted to anyone was that there were times when Lorraine bored him to death. She chattered on and on about things that did not interest him, but he found that when he was away from her he missed her constant talk. Boston seemed an enormous place to him and he was lonely when he walked the streets by himself. All his friends had girls and being with Lorraine was far better than being alone.

It was winter. Jess and Lorraine sat in movie theaters and held hands, then they sat in restaurants where they drank hot chocolate and held hands. They walked in the snowy, deserted Common, shivering, and held hands.

“Of all the goddamned foolishness!” said Harkinson. “Look, I'll fix you up with a hotel room. Then at least you'll be off the goddamned streets.”

As for Lorraine, Jess was a novelty to her. As she told her roommates, he was the first man she had ever gone out with who hadn't tried to get his hand down the front of her blouse on the very first date, but as the weeks passed and still Jess kept his distance from her, Lorraine began to wonder if she left him cold, and in the end her curiosity became almost an obsession.

“Listen,” she told Jess. “It's too cold to keep walking. I've got something at home that would keep us both warm. Brandy. Let's go to my place for a while. We could have a drink and sit where it's warm. Would you like to?”

“I'd like to very much,” said Jess. “But won't your roommates mind?”

“Kit and Eloise have gone skiing up to New Hampshire with their boyfriends from B. U.”

At the apartment, she took his coat and hung it up in the closet with her own and for some reason this gave Jess a warm feeling of belonging there, alone with Lorraine. They sat on her studio couch and drank brandy out of jelly glasses. The apartment was warm and quiet and suddenly there was nothing to talk about.

Jess could imagine Harkinson saying, “First of all, children, you must have the proper setting. Any deserted nook or cranny will do: parked car, graveyard, et cetera, but the most desirable is a quiet room, preferably one furnished with a comfortable bed or couch. Floors are hell on a bare behind.” He was suddenly afraid for Lorraine. Suppose she were in a situation like this with a man like Harkinson.

“Lorraine, don't you have any parents to look after you?” he asked.

“They're dead,” she said. “I've been on my own since I was sixteen.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

“Why?” she demanded. “They both drank and fought like cats and dogs. I'm better off this way.”

Jess had never felt so sorry for anyone in his life. He put his empty glass down on the cluttered end table and Lorraine set hers down on the floor. Then she sat still, gazing into his eyes until finally he took her in his arms. A throat-closing desire to protect her overcame him so that he tightened his arms around her and felt hot tears behind his eyelids.

“I don't like the idea of you living alone like this,” he said. “It could be dangerous, a young girl like you—”

“Crazy,” she whispered against his lips. “My crazy, crazy Jess.”

Her mouth was warm and very soft and her body was small and pliant against him. She let him press her down on the couch and her mouth opened under his insistent lips. Suddenly he wanted to crush her, cover her, smother her, and he made himself draw away, afraid of this strange desire to hurt and destroy.

“Don't pull away from me,” she whispered. “Please, Jess, don't pull away from me.”

And then it was everything, he thought.
Everything
.

The feel of her rigid nipple against his palm, the whisper of her clothes as she let them slide to the floor, the slim whiteness of her thighs and the way she moaned.

“Darling, darling, darling.” Everything.

“Are you sure?” he whispered.

Instead of words she answered him by pressing her mouth against his shoulder and moving her legs against his and when she twisted her head from side to side and cried, “No. No, no, no,” Jess clenched his teeth and hated himself for not sparing her this pain and then he thought of nothing and felt only the majestic thrill of taking this woman for his own.

Afterwards, she lay in his arms, shivering and weeping.

“Darling, I'm so sorry,” he said. “Darling, don't cry. Please, darling. I love you. We'll be married.”

Lorraine stopped crying at once and lit a cigarette.

“All right, Jess,” she said calmly.

She got up to pour more brandy and as she walked across the room, still naked, to Jess she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She came back to him and they leaned back side by side on the couch and shared one lumpy pillow.

“Of course,” said Jess, “it'll be a long time before I can support a wife. After I finish at Harvard I'll have to intern for two years.”

“Then that makes five years in all, doesn't it?” asked Lorraine. “After this year, I mean.”

“Yes,” said Jess, frightened at the thought of so much time. He turned and put his lips against her throat. “But we can wait, can't we, darling?” he asked.

“But Jess,” she said. “Suppose after tonight I found that I was going to have a baby?”

A baby. He could almost hear the sound of his hopes for the future shattering against a cold wall of fact. A baby!

He studied the pattern of white roses against the green background of the studio couch slipcover. He reached out a finger and traced the outline of one fat, full-blown flower.