Love's lovely counterfeit - James M. Cain [48]
"I don't know. I kind of like them."
"I don't mind them, except for one thing. There's not over five or six of them and they sing them over and over again. After 'Come All Ye Faithful' and 'Silent Night, Holy Night' and 'It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,' why then, what have you got?"
"Trouble with you is, you just don't like music."
"Come to think of it, maybe that's right."
"I know all them hymns."
"Words and all?"
"I ever tell you how I started, Ben?"
"In a reform school, wasn't it?"
"In a way it was. They put me in a reform school, and I wore a denim suit, and worked on the farm, setting out tomato plants, and hoeing onions, and thinning corn. Corn was the worst. It almost broke your back. Then I got reformed. I got religion, and when they let me out I went around preaching. And then one summer I hooked up with a big evangelist, him doing the big night meeting and me talking to the young people in the afternoon. And the night of the big thank offering, I got all the dough, at the point of a gun from the treasurer of the outfit with a handkerchief over my face. But he caught my walk, as I skipped around the corner. He knew me by that, and they got me. That's how I know all them hymns, Ben. I started out as a preacher."
Even Ben, a little too prone to accept everything in life as an everyday occurrence, blinked at this recital. Lefty got out his wallet and began thumbing through the wad of papers it contained. He found what he wanted, a tattered square which he handled carefully, so as not to tear it. Handing it to Ben, he said, "A regular preacher with a license." Ben read the printing, under the imprimatur of some obscure sect, glanced at the signature, which was written over the title, Bishop of Missoula, Montana, and stared at the name which had been typed into the body of the certificate: Richard Hosea Gauss. He handed it back. "Well, say, I never knew that. That's a funny one, isn't it? I bet you could make them holler amen, too."
"I still can."
"...Little highball?"
"You notice I generally drink beer?"
"Hold everything."
Ben disappeared into the pantribar, came back with two tall glasses, collaring creamily within a perilously short distance of the tops. He set one in front of Lefty, apologizing for being forgetful. Lefty took a meditative sip, waiting for the little hic that would follow. When it came, he said, "I guess maybe it's a hangover from them revival days, but it always seemed to me that liquor was wrong. However—there can't be no harm in beer."
"Remember Pearl Harbor."
"Oh we wouldn't forget that."
The party that Ben descended to, in Drawing Room B, was typically citified. That is to say, the clothes, the food, and the service were streamlined, straight out of the Twenty-First Century; the manners, the flirtation, the wit, a little dull. June had invited the whole Social Service Bureau, which was mainly feminine, and these ladies had brought husbands, lovers, and friends who ran a little to spectacles; she had invited also the firm of lawyers for whom she had worked before she entered politics, and these gentlemen had brought their wives; she had invited the city comptroller, the city assessor, the city engineer, and various other officials with whom she came in daily contact, and these gentlemen had not only brought their wives, but in some cases their whole families, consisting of in-laws, daughters, and sons. A few of the gentlemen wore white ties, but most of them wore black, and one or two of them red; there were even a few uniforms present; the party certainly didn't lack for variety. Nor did it lack for spirit. The Looney Lolligaggers, a five-piece orchestra that the hotel recommended for small private parties, was dispensing its tunes, and most of the guests were dancing. The lunacy of the Lolligaggers, so far as one could see, consisted mainly of bouncing up and down as they blew into their instruments; otherwise they seemed to be very usual boys in white mess jackets.
June let Ben in with civility rather than hospitality. She wore a bottle green dress, with bracelet,