From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [117]
“Well dont mention it,” Maggio said. “In the first place she couldnt never act anyways. And in the second place all this ‘the Cary Grants visited the Herbert Marshalls for Sunday badminton,’” he minced. “Whats that got to do with acting? She makes me sick, her with her new hat every day to please her adoring public while the world is blowing itself to hell.”
“All right,” Readall Treadwell grinned. “You dont care if I read her column, do you, Angelo? You wont beat me up if I read it will you?”
Maggio grinned, then laughed, the fiery Italian anger gone as quick as it had come. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll beat you up. You think you’d stand a chance with me? I keep a sawed off pool cue in my wall locker just for guys like you.”
“All right,” Prew said, “beat him up later. Right now, deal the cards.”
“I dont feel much like playin any more,” Maggio said. “I guess my arm’s tired. Theres no fun in gambling without money. I quit. Lets look at my old photograph alabum instead, and I show you a picture of that Jewgirl I was tellin about.”
“Okay by me,” Prew said. He was bored with the cards too, now that the sudden, memorable conversation had petered out, but the thinking of Willard still making him feel he should utilize this running luxury of time that had been so momentous and now was being spent insignificantly.
He watched Angelo get out the album, a big and nearly completely filled one that he had seen a thousand times before and knew as well as he would have known his own if he had ever had one, but he never had because he did not believe in collecting photographs that were always posed and therefore never truthful, but that now he wished sometimes he had because, even if they were not truthful, they would have shown him himself and all the places he had been and people he had known as they were then, bringing back truthful memories out of their untruthfulness, like this one of Angelo’s obviously did for him. The first third of it, that he always showed them first, devoted to a younger Angelo from Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and who had a family, believe it or not its true, look and see for yourself, one soldier who really had a family, there they are, the whole fifteen of them; the fat, round faced, obviously too lenient, plainly too undignified, grinning Mr Maggio, trying hard not to grin but to look dignified, and not succeeding; and the even fatter, stern long faced, very hard bargain driving, policy dictating, family dominating, not grinning Mrs Maggio, trying hard to grin and to not look dignified, and not succeeding; both trying very hard to deceive the camera, as everybody tried to deceive the camera, into showing only what they wanted it to show; together with all thirteen of their slicked up grinning offspring, all grinning at the camera with that temporarily donned, fake, denying-anything-but-happiness, happiness that all camera subjects but the most caught-unawares camera subjects (and us artists, he thought grimly remembering how he had to put into a Taps his secrets he could not talk about, us artists who are under a compulsion to be ashamed in public) always grinned at the camera with; each dressed in his own full length snapshot little Angelo could always carry with him; (and the sounds and smells of a grocery store in Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn with quarters upstairs came back to me who had never been there or seen it and probably never would, but that I knew now just as well as if I had always known them). And then the last two-thirds of it devoted to Hawaii, the Army, and the tourists photographs of Hawaii and the Army, two entirely different things, tourist photographs of Honolulu, the Mormon Temple, Waikiki Beach, the big Hotels (Halekulani, Royal Hawaiian, Moana; that none of us had ever seen the insides of), Diamond Head, a tourist picture of Schofield that looked