Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [46]
They often kissed after that; in the halls, the butler s pantry, and in her Scripps-Booth roadster, which had a peculiar seating arrangement; the driver sat a foot or so forward of the other seat, which made kissing an awkward act. He went away without telling her that he loved her, and without changing her status as woman or girl. He was dead of gangrene within six months of his visit to Gibbsville, and it was another two months before his family remembered to write to them. That had something to do with lessening Caroline s grief: that he could have been lying dead in a grave while she went on thinking of him as the love of her life, while she was having a lovely time with the boys who were back from France and Pensacola and Boston Tech and the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. She was in demand, and she kissed a good many men with as much abandon as she had kissed Jerome Walker, except that now she knew how and when to stop. She was getting to be a prom trotter, too, as much as Bryn Mawr would permit, and having a perfectly wonderful time with the college boys. They were gay again now that the war was over and their universal embarrassment at not being in the fighting army was at an end, now that it was all right to be gay publicly. She was leaving for a week-end at Easton, where Ju English was in college, when her mother read the letter from England, which was mostly about how grateful the Cecil Walkers were for the hospitality their boy had received in Gibbsville, as they called it. There was one reference to Caroline. It was: ... and if you and your dear little girl should come to England, we shall ... Oh, well. But not oh, well. She knew, or hoped she knew, that the reason he did not tell his mother more about her was that he didn’t want his mother to think things. Still, on the ride to Easton she was depressed. When our minds run that way we date periods in our lives, and Caroline in later days and years fixed the train ride to Easton as the end of her girlhood. All her life, until she fell in love with Julian English, she was to feel that if things had been different, she would have married her cousin and lived in England, and she always thought very kindly of England. She did not, however, visit Jerome s family when she went abroad in 1925. She was only going to be gone two months altogether, and by that time she was in love with a living man. Joe Montgomery could be classified under many headings. Drunk. Snake. Rich boy. Well-dressed man. Debbies delight. Rou?Bond salesman. War veteran. Extra man. And so on. They all added up to the same thing. His chief claim to distinction was that he had known Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton, and that made him in Caroline s eyes an ambassador from an interesting country, full of interesting people whom she wanted to meet and to see in action. She did not know, of course, that she was a member in good standing of the community which she thought Joe Montgomery represented, which Fitzgerald wrote about. She only knew that Gibbsville was her home town, but it or the people who lived in it certainly were not worth writing about. Joe Montgomery s home was in Reading, which is across two state lines from New York, but actually in the same radius as Hartford or New London a fact which apparently is not known to any New Yorkers or to most Reading people, but was taken for granted by Joe Montgomery. His father was so rich that he had gone down in the Titanic, and it was told of Henry Montgomery, as it has been told of almost every other male on that vessel s passenger list, that he had been (a) a hero, and (b) that the captain had had to shoot him dead to keep him out of the women s and children s lifeboats. Things in Joe s background included vague recollections in Caroline s mind of a Stutz Bearcat, a raccoon coat, Brooksy clothes, and some local reputation as a golfer. He knew a few people in Gibbsville, and he was a friend of Whitney Hofman s, but he seldom came to Gibbsville. He was hardly more than a name to Caroline in 1925, when she was thrown with him for a festive week in East