From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [52]
“I want you to move to Wahiawa and shack up with me,” he said bluntly.
Violet sat in her chair on the porch, half-turned toward him, her elbow on the arm, cheek resting on a half closed fist. “Why, Bobbie?” She continued to stare at him curiously, the same curiosity with which she always watched him, as if seeing for the first time the subtle mechanism from which she got her pleasure, and that she had always thought was simple. “You know I cant do that. Why make a showdown of it?”
“Because I wont be able to come up here any more,” he said, “like I used to. Before I transferred. If we lived in Wahiawa, I’d come home every night.”
“What is wrong with living this way?” she asked him, in the same odd tone. “I dont mind if you only come up on weekends. You dont have to come every night like you used to do, before you transferred.”
“Weekends aint enough,” he said. “At least not for me.”
“If you break off with me,” Violet said, “you wont get it even that often, will you? You wont find any woman who will shack up with a private who makes twenty-one dollars.”
“I dont like being around your folks,” Prew said, “they bother me; they dont like me. If we’re goin to be shacked up, we might as well be shacked up. Instead of this half way stuff. Thats the way it is.” He said it flatly, like a man enumerating the faults and values of a new spring coat.
“I’d have to quit my job. I’d have to get another job in Wahiawa. That might be hard, unless I took a job as waitress in a bar, and I cant do that.
“I quit my job in Kahuku,” she said indifferently, “and left a nice home where I was one of the family—to come back here to this rotten place—against my parents’ wishes that I not leave my higher position. I did it so I could be near enough for you to come up every night. I did it because you asked me to.”
“I know you did,” he said, “I know you did. But I didnt know it would be like this.”
“What did you expect?” she said. “You dont make enough to pay for shacking up, Bobbie.”
“I did. I’ve got almost a full month’s pay as a First-Fourth coming,” he said carefully. “It’ll be enough to get us set up for a month, until you get a job and I get some more dough. With your job and my twenty-one bucks we can live better than you’re livin here. And you dont like it here. Theres no reason for you not to go.” He stopped talking, long enough to get his breath, surprised at how fast he had been talking.
“You didnt believe me, did you?” Violet said, “when I said I couldnt go, when I said why make a showdown. You cant force me, Bobbie. Momma and Poppa would not like it, they wouldnt let me go.”
“Why wouldnt they like it?” he said, trying to keep his voice from going faster. “Because I’m a soljer. Do you care whether I’m a soljer or not? If you do, why the hell did you go with me in the first place? why did you let me come here? They cant keep you by not wanting you to go. How can they keep you?”
“They would be disgraced,” Violet said.
“Oh, balls!” Prew said, letting loose the rein. “If I was a gook beachboy instead of a soljer it’d be all right though.” This was what he knew it would come down to. They’d live like cattle, worse than Harlan miners, but they’d be disgraced if their daughter shacked up with a soldier. They’d let the Big Five shove a cane stalk up their keister, but that was not disgraceful. That wasnt soldiers. The poor, he thought, they are always their own worst enemy.
“Its not as if we were married,” she said softly.
“Married!” Prew was dumbfounded. The picture of Dhom, the G Company duty sergeant, bald and massive and harassed, crossed his eyes, trailed by his fat sloppy Filipino wife and seven half-caste brats; no wonder Dhom was a bully, condemned to spend his life in foreign service like an exile because he had a Filipino wife.
Violet smiled at his consternation. “You see? You dont want to marry me. Look at my side. Some day you will go back to the Mainland. Will