From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [136]
“You dont like Mrs Kipfer, do you?”
“Like her,” Maureen said. “I love her. She kills me. If it wasnt for her I dont know what I’d do for laughs. Her and her stinking highclass ways, acting like she’s Mrs Stinking Astor.”
“How’d she ever get in this business anyway?”
“Like any of the rest of them. Started at the bottom and worked up to being foreman.”
“She’s got a damn good figure for it.”
“And thats all the good it’ll do you,” Maureen laughed. “You might as well try to make the Queen of England. Listen, Babyface,” she said. “You look artistic, Stark says you a bugler. Imagine something for me. Imagine having your own mother run the whorehouse you work in, can you?”
“No,” Prew said. “I cant.”
“Then you can see what I mean,” Maureen said. “About laughs.” She yawned, almost in his face, and stretched her thin arms. “Lets see,” she said. “Hows our introductions comin? Thats Sandra,” she said, pointing to the other girl who had been sitting with the two sailors when he came in and who was still with them now, a tall brunette who wrinkled her pert nose as she laughed gayly with the sailors, shaking the glistening cascade of long hair whenever she laughed, which was often.
“She’s proud of her long hair,” Maureen razzed, almost indifferently now, from force of habit. “She also says she’s a college grad, some coed school in the Middle West. She’s writin a novel now, about her life as a prostitute, suthin like this Call House Mistress book.”
“Yeah?” Prew grinned.
“Yeah,” Maureen said. “And them other three,” she said, pointing at the three fat, gum chewing ones, “are Moe, Larry, and Curly.”
Prew laughed out loud. “You’re a character yourself.”
Maureen stared at him quizzically. “I’m goin to buy them a checkerboard after Payday, if they promise to quit chewing gum. Theres four or five more back in the second waiting room, if you want to meet them too. But I wouldnt be surprised they all asleep.”
“Dont disturb them.”
“Why now, thank you. Dear,” Maureen said. “Thats sweet of you.”
“Dont mention it.”
“Well,” she said, “do you see anything you like? or not? I aint got all night.”
“I like them all. Especially Moe, Larry, and Curly,” he said, looking back across the room now at Lorene.
“The Princess is purty, aint she?” Maureen said.
“Oh,” he said. “So-so.”
“You mean you think she’ll do,” Maureen said. “You mean she’d be all right. In a pinch. A good hard pinch.”
“Thats it,” Prew said.
Maureen stood up suddenly and smoothed her dress.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, Dear,” she minced. “I can plainly see I will be of no use to you much. I seem to lack that virginal quality so profitable in a good whore.”
“Nobody seems to like her around here,” Prew said. “Why is that?”
“Call it professional jealousy,” Maureen said. “For lack of a better name.
“Well,” she said, “much as I hate to dash off I am afraid you must allow me to tear myself away. Much as I adore your company, there is still business to attend to. Minerva is opening the door to let someone in, and as Mother Kipfer says, business must come before pleasure.”
“Then dont let me detain you,” Prew said, “from your duty.” He grinned, flatly because all this had stopped being funny, but broadly because he liked this one and did not want to hurt her any more than he had to to get free of her.
She flashed him back a grin that understood his own completely, and he watched her teeter on her meatless hips across the room, walking on her spike heels like a small boy on stilts, humpily with the high thin shoulders swaying precariously; him feeling as he watched her a big, great sadness of inevitability like a bugle’s Taps. But underneath this, more urgent and more understandable, the thick chokiness in his throat again as he looked over at Lorene who still sat alone serenely waiting, his blood beating in his eyes because he was free to go back there now.
Then as he got up, from beyond Maureen’s head and shoulders in the doorway, he heard the great door thud shut and the bar drop back into its brackets and then, suddenly, the powerful Brooklynese