Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [38]
to be suppressed by the vice squad. There was the time Elinor Holloway heroine of many an interesting event in club history shinnied half way up the flagpole while five young gentlemen, standing at the foot of the pole, verified the suspicion that Elinor, who had not always lived in Gibbsville, was not naturally, or at least not entirely, a blonde. There was the time, the morning after a small, informal party for a visiting women s golf team, when a Mrs. Goldorf and a Mrs. Smith, and Tom Wilk, the Reverend Mr. Wilk s son, and Sam Campbell, the caddymaster, all had to have the stomach pump. That was complicated by the fact that they were all together, in bed or on the floor, in Sam s room upstairs in the caddyhouse. There was the time Whit Hofman and Carter Davis got so sore at a New York orchestra that wanted too much money to play overtime, that they broke all the instruments and pushed the bass drum all the way down the club hill to the state highway. The result of that was a nice suit, some Philadelphia publicity, and a temporary blacklisting of the club by the musicians union. There were numerous physical combats between husbands and wives, and not always the husbands that matched the wives. Kitty Hofman, for instance, had been given a black eye by Carter Davis when she kicked him in the groin for dunking her head in a punch bowl for calling him a son of a bitch for telling her she looked like something the cat dragged in. And so on. Julian had another drink and a fresh cigarette. And then there were people. Terrible people, who didn’t have to do anything to make them terrible, but were just terrible people. Of course they usually did do something, but they didn’t have to. There was (Mrs.) Emily Shawse, widow of the late Marc A. Shawse, former mayor of Gibbsville, and one-time real estate agent, who had developed the West Park section of Gibbsville. Mrs. Shawse did not participate in club activities, but she was a member. She came down to the club summer afternoons and sat alone on the porch, at one end of the porch, watching the golfers and tennis players and the people in the pool. She would have a fruit lemonade on the porch, and have one sent out to Walter, her Negro chauffeur. She would stay an hour and leave, and go for a drive in the country, presumably. But if she wasn’t having an affair with Walter, Gibbsville missed its guess. No one ever had seen her speak with Walter, not even good-morning-Walter, good-morning-Mrs.-Shawse; but it certainly looked fishy. Walter had the car, a Studebaker sedan, at all hours of the day and night. He always had money to bet on the races, and he was a good customer at the Dew Drop Inn, where the Polish and Lithuanian girls had not been brought up to draw the color line. Julian prided himself on the fact that he had blocked the sale of a Cadillac to Mrs. Shawse. She had wanted one, or at least was ready to buy one in exchange for a little attention, in a nice way, from Julian. She had put him in a tough spot for a while. He couldn’t just say he didn’t want to sell her a car. He eventually solved the problem by telling her he would give her only a hundred and fifty in a trade involving the Studebaker, which then was worth, trade-in value, about six times that much, and when she still was not rebuffed he sent Louis, the pimply, bowlegged carwasher, with the demonstrator, instead of going himself. Mrs. Shawse kept the Studebaker. There was Harry Reilly s own nephew, Frank Gorman, a squirt if ever there was one. Frank got drunk at every last party the minute his mother went home. It was because of him that she came to the club dances. He was at Georgetown, having been kicked out of Fordham and Villanova, not to mention Lawrenceville, New York Military Academy, Allentown Prep and Gibbsville High School. Frank was a spindle-shanked young man who wore the most collegiate clothes, the kind that almost justify the newspaper editorials. He had a Chrysler roadster, a raccoon coat, adenoids, and some ability as a basketball player. He was a loud-mouth and a good one-punch fighter, who accepted