Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [52]
was something that did not exist in Gibbsville; one of those Harvard men, tall and slim and swell, who seem to have put on a clean shirt just a minute ago soft white shirt with button-down collar and not to have had a new suit in at least two years. He was not rich; he had money. He had big strong teeth and his charm had something to do with a deceptive awkwardness, a result of his height, and his St. Paul s-Harvard voice and accent. He became a non-resident member of the Lantenengo Country Club as a matter of course when he began to see Caroline, and that was when Caroline first noticed that he was, besides everything else, a snob. He told her he was going to join. I ll ask Whitney Hofman to put me up. I think it d be best to ask him to get someone to second me. I don t really know anyone else. He knew some others as well as he knew Whit Hofman, but Caroline saw that what he meant was that Whit Hofman, being the richest and the impeccable young man of Gibbsville, was the only man of whom he would ask a favor. And so Ross was put up by Mr. Whitney Stokes Hofman, seconded by Mrs. Whitney Stokes Holman; initiation fee $50, annual dues $25. Then she noticed that he was a bit on the stingy side. He always added restaurant charges before signing the checks. He rolled his own cigarettes, which may have been an honest preference in tobacco, but looked like an economy; and once after winning a few dollars in a bridge game at the club he pocketed his winnings with the remark: That covers my gas and oil expenses this trip. Not bad. This somebow did not fit in with what you would expect of a man whose life work was keeping the estate s affairs in shape. I have to. Mother doesn’t know the multiplication table higher than the six-times table. Caroline began to see that she was right about his not being a coal-region rich man. Some of the things that made him himself were things that she liked his manners, his manner, his way of walking into any party with a smile that was pleasant enough but at the same time said, What have you got to offer me? She liked the simple fact of his not ever trying to kiss her; she liked it and kept postponing her inquiry as to the reason for it. But by postponing that, or any and all inquiry, she did something else; she lost interest in him. The day came when she did not have to postpone the analysis of his diffidence, and she became merely satisfied with his diffidence. There was no showdown, because she let him see what had happened: she did not care if he never came to Gibbsville. She did not condone her behavior. She knew that her friends and not only those of her own sex were for the first time a little in awe of her, practically rediscovering her, because Ross Campbell so obviously was interested in her. She was sorry for her friends, who already were thinking of the New York and Boston ushers; and in a not quite sincere way, she was sorry for herself. After all, there had been six or seven times when she had liked him so enormously at particular moments that she wanted to get closer to him, to put her arms around him. But she never had, and the whole thing spilled away. It wasn’t long before it became very, very easy to think of him as a stick, a stuffed shirt. At the same time she was worried and angry with herself. There was something wrong and incomplete in her relations with all the men she had liked best and loved. They were wrong, and circumstances were wrong; Jerome Walker had been too decent because she was too young; Joe Montgomery was the man she had loved most in her life, but because of an engagement with other people, she had not seen him on the night before she sailed; Ross Campbell, who was not a great love but certainly was the right man for her to marry, had turned into nothing, right before her eyes. And there weren t any other men; led by Julian English there were a lot of men whom she had kissed or necked with, whom she disliked in retrospect with what approached a passion. Altogether she was contemptuous of the men she had known, no matter how tenderly she remembered minutes in