Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [89]
All right. Let them come again. Let s not go to their Junior League dance. Let them help our charity. Caroline, you have your party that night. The twenty-sixth.
How about it, Ju? That s all right, isn’t it?
You’re God damn right. I won a hundred dollars on the game. No, two hundred. But anyway, a hundred that I ll get. Bobby Herrmann will owe me his hundred.
Well then, that s settled. The twenty-sixth we’ll have our party. Our own crowd and some of the school kids, the ones that can drink. Not Johnny Dibble and kids that age, but a little older, said Caroline. Oh, dear me, said Julian. My goodness sakes alive. Oh, my. We have to have Johnny. We must have Johnny Dibble. Why, he s practically a Deke. No matter where he goes to college, he s going to be a Deke.
Not if he goes to State, said Whit. Right. Not if he goes to State. No Dekes at State. How d you know that, Whit? You know more about D. K. E. than I do. Why can t we have Johnny, Caroline? He s a nice kid. ... Well, kind of nice.
All right, we’ll have him, if you insist. He drinks as well as you do, for that matter. He’ll make a good Deke. Who else shall we blackball? Caroline and Kitty worked on the list, and the next week it was in Gwen Gibbs column on the society page of the Standard. Gwen Gibbs column was a dumping ground for all society gossip on the Standard. There was no Miss Gibbs, of course. There was an Alice Cartwright, graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and daughter of the current Baptist minister. Miss Cartwright knew very few of the Lantenengo Street crowd and except for the Purim Ball and K. of C. Promenade she was not on any of the invitation lists. She certainly never for a second expected to be on the list of the invited guests for the English party. And she wasn t. Yet the night of the party she was the only one who arrived at the attractive home of that leading young business man and that charming leader of the younger married set; in this case, Mr. and Mrs. Julian M. English. Julian got afraid of something the moment he walked away from Caroline and climbed in his own car. He never looked her way again after he left her. He treated his car more considerately. He moved along, approaching the business district at a moderate rate of speed, extra-careful of the rights of other motorists and of pedestrians, and resolved that since he was already a quarter of an hour late for his date with Lute Fliegler, he would break the date entirely and without explanation. He did that with a clear conscience because he effected an exchange in himself: in exchange for accepting in advance the hell and the fury of what he was going to have to face with his father and Harry Reilly and the lesser stockholders in the company, who were going to have to save him from bankruptcy he paid himself off by keeping the rest of this day to himself. If ever there was a man in a jam, he was it, he was sure. It was no more difficult to face a fist or to enter the front-line trenches than it was going to be to meet these people, especially his father. Nobody would have the crust to tell his father about the Stage Coach episode, because his father was a kind of man who would have the Stage Coach raided for less reason than that his son had been a fool there. But someone was sure to tell him about throwing a drink in Harry Reilly s puss. It was the sort of thing Gibbsville men, their identities masked by hot towels, would be hearing often in the hotel barber shop for the next couple of weeks. And yet it was not so bad as the mess at the Gibbsville Club. The Polack lawyers would tell every Good Christ! Polacks are Roman Catholics! Julian thought of that for the first time. And now he remembered seeing the emblem of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks in the lapel of the man he had knocked down. Is there anything I haven t done? Anyone I haven t insulted, at least indirectly? ... He tried to be honest and to figure out every possible bad angle to